Each side of this mostly friendly argument has a strength and a weakness. The difficulty of the wage-stagnation theory is that wages haven’t actually stagnated. Even looking only at men’s wages, the median wage has risen during the last 30 years. It hasn’t risen as rapidly as in the 1950s and 1960s, but the trend has been much better than in the 1970s and 1980s, when it fell.
Source: Want a Big Family? You Need Family-Friendly Federal Policy – Bloomberg
Wonder why it stalled? Because there was a surplus of labor entering the market in the late 1970s and extending into the 1980s, due to the high fertility that peaked in 1960, and then collapsed. This cohort entered the job markets in the mid’70s to late 80’s, all competing with each other for jobs. That helped reduce the need for wage hikes during a period of high inflation too.
The column linked above is ostensibly about allegedly needing more government programs to support having a family, to address the fertility rate problem. But there is a fatal flaw in this argument: Countries like Denmark and Sweden have among the most generous family policies in the world and their fertility rates are the same or worse than the U. S. There is no indication that more government will solve this.
