The BLS released its estimate of total worker compensation for Q1 today. This includes both wages and benefits. Here's where pay is highest and lowest:
The nationwide average for private industry workers is $41 per hour. It's significantly higher for public workers ($58), union workers ($54), and big companies ($59).
Adjusted for inflation, total compensation for private industry workers increased at an annualized rate of 1.8% from Q4 of 2022.
Next I trust is a comparison of living costs between those same locales.
OK, this is useful to compare costs across major markets. But this statistic is an average that includes workers of all types. The SF market has lots of high-paid tech workers. Miami has loads of hospitality workers. This average obscures meaningful differences in the makeup of the populations.
What I would find more interesting is the variance in these averages. The cost of employing a part-time, no benefits, minimum wage worker is only slightly greater than the employee's hourly wage while the cost of a full-time, salaried employee with a full benefits package is significantly greater.
In short, the differences in this chart are skewed by real wage inequality, but only in a roundabout way.
This average obscures meaningful differences in the makeup of the populations.
It doesn't "obscure" those differences. It just doesn't deal with compositional effects either way. I strongly suspect Kevin's readership is aware that the economic activties of San Francisco aren't identical to those of Miami. And yes, to state the obvious (because it is bloody obvious) workers in metro areas defined by concentrations of high value-added sectors will tend to be more costly than those where this effect is less prevalent.
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Dang. If she had just told us what city she lived in this comment would have been totally relevant.
Just because it has a chart with both SF and Miami: https://www.ft.com/content/d0c0fd7b-e2fc-4da3-a698-4b959efa1bfd