Nice Work If You Can Get It.(recessions, wages,a nd unemployment)

This is the Age of the Incredible Shrinking Everything. Home prices, the stock market, G.D.P., corporate profits, employment: they're all a fraction of what they once were. Yet amid this carnage there is one thing that, surprisingly, has continued to grow: the paycheck of the average worker. Companies are slashing payrolls: 3.6 million people have lost their jobs since the recession started, with half of those getting laid off in just the past three months. Yet average hourly wages jumped almost four per cent in the past year. It's harder and harder to find and keep a job, but if you've got one you may well be making more than you did twelve months ago.

This combination of rising unemployment and higher wages seems improbable. But, as it turns out, it's what history would lead us to expect. Even during the early years of the Great Depression, manufacturing workers actually saw their real wages rise, and wage cuts have been scarce in every recession since. Oil and wheat prices may rise and fall instantaneously to reflect supply and demand, but wages are "sticky": even when the economy goes bad, it takes a lot to make them fall.

It's not because businesses are generous that wages are sticky; it's because employers are worried. In part, bosses are afraid of what economists call "adverse selection": if they cut wages, it's the least productive workers who would be the most likely to stay, while the best workers would start looking elsewhere. (Even in a weak economy, businesses still compete for talent.) In a 1997 study of almost two hundred employers, the economists Carl Campbell and Kunal Kamlani found that the threat of losing their best employees was a major reason that bosses didn't cut wages.

Even more important is the impact of wage cuts on morale. After the 1990-91 recession, the economist Truman Bewley interviewed managers and labor officials at more than two hundred companies and found that most believed that wage cuts wreck employee morale and eat away at productivity. Whatever money they'd save by cutting wages, bosses assume, would be cancelled out by the decline in effort and the breakdown of trust that wage cuts would create. Not everyone believes this: in the past month, both Hewlett-Packard and FedEx have announced plans for pay cuts. But generally, when sales and profits drop, wages aren't cut, even in firms undergoing layoffs. Of course, layoffs don't exactly help morale, but, as one of the bosses that Bewley interviewed coldly put it, they "get the misery out the door." Cutting wages keeps the misery around.

Today's sticky wages aren't just the result of custom, though. They've also stayed high because of the most unusual aspect of this recession: even as the economy has cratered, American workers have become more productive, not less. Productivity--how much output workers produce per hour of work--is the key to a healthy economy. Historically, productivity has been ...