Numbers released today for 2021Q4.

Figure 1: Nonfarm business sector output per hour (blue), compensation deflated by consumer pries (brown), and compensation deflated by nonfarm business sector implicit price deflator (green). All normalized to 1967=1.00. NBER defined recession dates peak-to-trough shaded gray. Source: BLS via FRED, NBER, author’s calculations.

Where NFB output per hour is Q_NFB/L_NFB, real compensation is W_NFB/P_cons, and product wage is W_NFB/P_NFB.

From 2000Q1 onward, productivity has grown 20.1 percentage points more than the real wage, calculated using consumer prices. Theory indicates that the marginal productivity of labor, ∂Q/∂L, (output per hour measures average productivity, Q/L) should equal the product wage, not the real wage (which depends on the consumption basket). Still, the product wage has grown 9.1 percentage points less than productivity, since 2000Q1 (in log terms) — and a chunk of the catchup is associated with the pandemic (as of 2019Q4, the product wage was 11.5% less than the productivity gain).