{"slug": "ai-s-pr-problem", "title": "AI's PR Problem", "summary": "Median real wages for both high school and college graduates have remained flat over the past 25 years, while the S&P 500 has more than quadrupled in inflation-adjusted terms, highlighting a growing disparity between labor and capital returns.", "body_md": "|\n\nThe college wage premium, that is, the increased earnings associated with having a college degree as opposed to only being a high school graduate, hasn’t changed at all in the past 25 years, because median real wages have been flat as a pancake foreverybody, no matter what their formal education level, for the past quarter century.\n\nI wonder what’s happened to capital over this time? Value of S & P 500, inflation-adjusted, 1/2000 to 9/2025 (same period as the wage data):On average, for\n\n2000: $1,394\n\n2025: $6,688\n\nI was fooling around withHere is a short list of YouTube videos on this topic:[FRED]this morning, as one does, and here are some stats: (The FRED numbers are presented in nominal dollars; I’ve converted them to CPI-adjusted dollars).\n\nMedian usual weekly earnings of workers with a high school degree only:\n\n2000: $968\n\n2025: $980\n\nMedian usual weekly earnings of workers with a bachelor degree only:\n\n2000: $1,587\n\n2025: $1,580\n\n...\n\nMedian usual weekly earnings of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher:\n\n2000: $1,705\n\n2025: $1,747", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-s-pr-problem", "canonical_source": "https://blog.dshr.org/2026/05/ais-pr-problem.html", "published_at": "2026-06-02 15:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-24 01:17:23.357116+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-ethics"], "entities": ["S&P 500", "FRED"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-s-pr-problem", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-s-pr-problem.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-s-pr-problem.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-s-pr-problem.jsonld"}}