The prevailing narrative among economists holds that recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-09 has been subpar largely because of the paltry annualized wage gains of about 2 percent since then.

But Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson begs to differ. "This isn't a low-wage job recovery," he writes. "Listen to the media and you might think that the only kind of jobs being created are in fast-food restaurants and retail chains."

That's just plain wrong, Samuelson says.

"The economy's employment profile — the split between high- and low-paying jobs — hasn't changed much since the recession or, indeed, the turn of the century."

Well-paid jobs account for just less than one-third of total employment, about the same as in 2000 and 2007.

"The weakness in wage growth is not driven by the mix of jobs being created but rather by labor market slack," Elise Gould, senior economist of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, tells Samuelson.

His conclusion: "the low-wage job recovery is more myth than reality."

Elsewhere on the economic front, Barry Eichengreen, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, says economic models have their place, but they also have their limits.

Neither simple models nor complex models are "useful for providing the practical advice that policymakers need in a crisis," he writes in an article for Project Syndicate. "To make them useful, evidence is required."

And indeed, "an evidentiary revolution is already underway" in economics, Eichengreen explains. Big data is one example. It "promises to enhance our ability to understand and even predict" phenomena such as how prices respond to economic news, he says.

"A second approach relies not on big data but on new data," Eichengreen writes. "Economists are using automated information-retrieval routines, to scrape bits of novel information about economic decisions from the [Internet]."

Third, there's historical evidence. "The global financial crisis was good for economic history, because it directed attention to previous crises and to the insights that could be gleaned from studying them," Eichengreen notes.

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