A cubic in labor costs

This is the histogram of wage changes, over a 12 month period. From the Federal Reserve:

Our final data set consists of 12-month rolling panels of wage data from January 1980 to December 2011, which we use to evaluate trends in the behavior of nominal wage changes. For details and a technical explanation of using the CPS data to track wage changes, see Daly, Hobijn, and Wiles (2011).

I dunno why they put that symmetrical dotted line in there, this is a perfect cubic, asymmetric solution.  It fits, workers are saying, keep wages stable and I will wait my turn for a promotion. The promotion is the slight bulge to the right.

This is absolutely consistent with a stable, efficient economy without cycles, exactly the behavior we want from labor. What would workers expect the bosses to do about this? Fit some three cubic splines over the promotion priority queue and spread them out to make total wage growth stable over time. Occasionally lay off workers who aren't due for promotion, and replace them with new workers at slightly less salary.  This is what workers have always done in any company I have worked for, even though I was the one generally laid off (doesn't work well with others).  Economists should model exactly this method. Add a slight negative to the left and keep most of the bulge to the right, with the zero spike as the balance point. Everything should mostly even out when this is repeated three times over a three queue.

We are not looking for changes over time, but variations in the queue length over the transaction rate, imbalances in entropic efficiency. Small business is quadratic, but big finance does cubic risk adjustment all the time, cubic is Jerry Brown's budgeting style, DC is basically linear, the Fed attempts, and fails, at quadratic. Break up your major components into linear, quadratic and cubic variance, I think you will be able to model the economy over 30 year periods.

What is linear variance?
The new regime has one fight with Congress and the result is crammed down to the top of the queue. The result sticks for eight year. No queue prioritizing.

Cycles are not the fault of labor, not directly.