In economic theory, in a perfectly competitive market, worker pay should rise at the same rate as worker productivity. Obviously, in the real world, this doesn’t hold, and we shouldn’t expect it to be exactly the same. But there are some economic doomsayers that purport to show massive differences in pay and productivity in the past few decades in the U.S.

A new report from Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute looks at the data to get the real story. He finds that the doomsayers are wrong, but the relationship between pay and productivity has changed in the past few decades, just not in the way many people might think.

He looks at three examples from the doomsayers: One from American Compass, one from the Economic Policy Institute, and one from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. They each show, to varying degrees, worker pay lagging far behind worker productivity over roughly the past 50 years.

Winship demonstrates that these comparisons are largely the result of comparing apples and oranges:

Winship performs several different analyses that are more theoretically sound, and they demonstrate that worker pay has tracked pretty closely with productivity:

Partly this just shows that data are not self-explanatory. As the great Robert Lucas explained, economists are storytellers. That isn’t a bad thing. “We do not find that the realm of imagination and ideas is an alternative to, or a retreat from, practical reality,” Lucas said. “On the contrary, it is the only way we have found to think seriously about reality.”

Thinking seriously about economic reality means comparing the stories economists tell and deciding which ones make more sense. Winship’s story on productivity makes a good amount of sense.

He says in his report that the growth in median compensation has lagged behind the growth in mean productivity. He argues that the U.S. has seen growing productivity inequality, with the most productive workers become more productive at a faster rate than other workers. Winship cites economic research that has found greater productivity inequality across industries, across firms, and within firms. Because pay tracks productivity, this would also help to explain why pre-tax income inequality, excluding government transfers, has grown. (Post-tax income inequality, including government transfers — i.e., what people actually make — has hardly budged.)

The bigger story in the trends for pay and productivity has to do with social changes in gender roles. Women’s pay has increased at a much higher rate than men’s pay as women have entered more productive sectors of the economy at higher rates.

Crucially, Winship argues that when men were more commonly seen as breadwinners and fewer women were formally employed, men were overpaid relative to their productivity. Government policies, such as the New Deal, World War II price controls, and the Wagner Act, which supercharged labor unions, contributed to wage growth above and beyond productivity growth. The U.S. also faced less international competition because most of the rest of the industrialized world had to spend a decade or two rebuilding after World War II. It would make sense that in this environment U.S. workers, mostly men, would be paid more than they would in a competitive market.

“Looking at trends since 1948 or 1973 is like choosing a year with a housing bubble as a starting point from which to look at homeownership trends,” Winship argues.

“If median pay was excessively high in 1973 relative to productivity levels, then it should not necessarily have grown as quickly as productivity over the next 49 years,” he writes. “Instead, we might expect that it would have grown more slowly until productivity growth could catch up—that pay growth might have been sluggish for some time so as to rationalize pay levels that had become unanchored to productivity growth.” The data seem to indicate that productivity caught up in the mid 1990s, and consequently, men’s pay then began to rise more quickly than it had since the mid 1970s.

Trends in marriage and family life have also contributed to lower wage growth for men relative to women, Winship argues. Married men today feel less pressure to be the sole income-earner for their households, so they have the ability to take a lower-paying, less productive job, focus more on child care, and still live comfortably. They are also likely to have fewer children on average than in the past, so there are fewer mouths to feed.

There has also been a decline in marriage rates in general, which means there are more single men who do not feel the pressure to provide for a family at all. “Research suggests that marriage has a causal impact on men’s earnings, raising them by as much as 25 percent,” Winship writes. Fewer married men means lower pay for men on average than in a population with more married men.

Winship is not saying everything is great. He is saying that the problems the U.S. faces are different from the ones the economic doomsayers purport to describe. “Rather than take seriously claims that the American economy is broken, policymakers should look for ways to raise economy-wide productivity and the productivity of working- and middle-class earners specifically,” Winship writes. This would include removing disincentives to marriage, still found throughout the welfare system, and improving education such that middle- and lower-class children are better prepared to be productive workers in today’s economy, not the economy of the 1950s.

Pay and productivity still track with each other when you look at apples-to-apples comparisons. Parts of Winship’s story may be wrong, but on the whole, it makes a lot more sense than the alternative stories that some cabal of greedy capitalists is conspiring to keep the little guy down, or that something about markets just stopped working in 1973 and has never been fixed despite decades of different government policies and economic trends since then. Policy-makers need to be informed by facts, not vibes, and populist agitation is a poor substitute for economic reasoning.