Karl Marx wasn’t the most persuasive at describing what the economic world should be like, but he was pretty perceptive about how the economy of his day actually worked. Not in the grand sense of expropriation and exploitation, but in how the nuts and bolts of it all worked. We can therefore use the correct parts of Marx’s work — as opposed to all that dreary democratic socialism stuff — to predict that wages are about to start rising strongly in the U.S.
To do so, we need just this one piece of information from the Labor Department: Job quits are up. Job openings are up to near 7 million but that’s not our useful metric here. It’s also true that “churn” — people losing or leaving a job then being hired elsewhere — is up, but that’s always high in an economy as vibrant as this one. It’s those increased quittings that are our real indicator of rising wages to come.
