CHARLES PAYNE (HOST): Your book is really contrarian, in that it pushes back against the narrative that income inequality is perhaps worst thing to happen to America.
EDWARD CONRAD: Well you look at performance of the United States. And we have a deep pool of properly highly motivated workers. Talent that have produce twice the employment growth of Germany and France, 3 times the employment growth of Japan at median incomes which are maybe 15 to 30 percent higher than those economies. And we have been able to achieve that growth with high scoring workers that -- half as many per low skilled worker that Germany has for example. So we've squeezed a lot of productivity out of the top of our workforce.
PAYNE: Although, more recently productivity has gone straight up. And wages have been flat. Is there -- how do you explain that is that a red flag for you at all?
[...]
Or should I say, and I didn't mean to cut you off but, is higher productivity just a euphemism for lower wages?
CONRAD: No, I wouldn't say that you see a couple this. One wages have been higher than they appear to be, because they don't include health care, pension, social security taxes things like that. So a lot of things missing in the wages, and when you put it back in they do appear to parallel productivity a little more closely. But, I do think it's the case that when we take a factory when you move it down to Mexico, we tell the workers," Hey don't worry, the entrepreneurs are coming, they're going to put you back to work" and that worker says “Hey wait a minute the guy moved to California.” Outsources his blue collar work to China. The engineers are now designing jobs for workers in Mexico. “Where is the entrepreneur to put me back to work and to drive my wages up?” So that does affect the wages of lower skill workers that we have to take into account.
