Yes. Krugman is very likely substantively correct that real incomes after inflation have risen and risen more for low earning workers than higher-earning workers. But I want to again point out that neither Krugman nor the and the Fed he cites really have the data to show that conclusively.
If an increase if real income means wages of some group have gone up faster than the prices they pay, we cannot know that if we do not have an index of both prices AND wages — and we do not have indexes of wages.
Why? Partly for good reasons. It is easier to make a price index than a wage index. A bushel of winter wheat, an 8 oz package of Colgate toothpaste, or a room in the motel next to the airport in Montrose Colorado are essentially identical from one month to the next. This is not the case with the persons working at the McDonal’s near my house.
Bureau of Labor Statistics, where I worked and learned a bit about price indices in 1967, therefor can and does make price indices by comparing prices of winter wheat or Colgate toothpaste from one month to the next, but not the wages of McDonald workers. Rather it compares the average of carefully defined earnings of groups of workers from time to time. This is not a wage index it is an index of unit value of earnings.
IFF the group is narrowly enough defined and the composition of the group does not change, an increase or decrease in this unit value index would be an increase or decrease in the average wages of the group just like a change in the price of Colgate toothpaste. But those “IFF”s cannot be met. The only way to do that is define a job – order taker at my McDonalds -- ask what their wage is this month and again next month. In effect the group has to be defined so narrowly that its composition cannot change,
There is also a different and from one point of view less good reason. If our interest is in the welfare of groups of people, a narrow unit value index is good enough. Even here, however, unit values can lead to absurd results. When early in the pandemic many low paying workers lost their jobs while better paid office workers could work from home, the unit value of earnings soared when no one’s incomes did.
Moreover, people, not groups, become employed and unemployed according to the relation between their wage and their contribution to the income of the entity that employes them. The Federal Reserve that has a Congressional mandate to seek maximum employment and that implies needing to know about wages, not unit values.
For macroeconomic management we need wage indices.
[See as well: https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/improvements-in-macroeconomic-data]
[Standard bleg: Although my style is know-it-all-ism, I do sometime entertain the thought that, here and there, I might be mistaken on some minor detail. I would welcome comments on these views.]