Recessions can somewhat distort wage scales, notes Bidwell, citing a book by Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman called Thinking, Fast and Slow, in which the author notes how people’s perceptions of fairness in pay are heavily skewed towards the compensation they are receiving today. For example, Bidwell says, if you hire a worker at $20 per hour in good times and cut his pay to $15 an hour during a recession, he will be more dissatisfied than if he was brought in at $13 an hour, even if he ends up making more money in the long run. “This idea gets to the question of why employers tend not to cut employees’ pay during recessions, and why employees hired during a recession tend to be paid less than they would in a booming economy.”