As far as I can tell, over the last few years at least, that's mostly not true: wages outpaced inflation, and it outpaced inflation more for lower-income workers than higher.

> In stark contrast to prior decades, low-wage workers experienced dramatically fast real wage growth between 2019 and 2023

https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/

("real wages" are wages adjusted for inflation)

The problem with comparing wages by cohort and average inflation is that inflation doesn't affect each cohort evenly. By and large, necessities continue to outpace top line inflation, and they have done so for decades. These include food, healthcare, housing, daycare, and education. Lower income people spend more of their income as a proportion on necessities, so they are impacted more than average by inflation. In order to tell if these lower income people have indeed received wage increases in line with inflation, we would need a model which uses a lower income basket of goods and services.

If I had to put on my tinfoil hat, I presume we don't do this because it would illustrate how badly the poorest are affected by inflation, and validate the frustrations they feel and which are clearly reflected in economic sentiment surveys.

I'm obviously not an expert, but assumed the same thing. I watched a fast food joint near me go from 9/hr to 21/hr in just a few years. Maybe that was just pandemic pricing, I don't know.

But getting >2x salary in such short order is outpacing pretty much everyone else, percentage wise.

If these reports say that things are better for low income people, why do people living that reality overwhelmingly disagree? Any statistics derived from inflation figures are doomed to be wrong when the inflation data was wrong to begin with.

I'm not in the US, but our inflation data was just as wrong as I've heard the US data was. Official numbers were 10% but literally everything went up at least 20%. Everyone I spoke to had their cost of living increase by significantly more than the official inflation figures.

And when "real wage growth" over 4 years is deemed to be just 13%, it's essentially guaranteed that real wage growth was in fact negative when you consider the disparity between real and official inflation figures. Statistics such as food insecurity rate, personal savings rate, and credit card delinquency rate would certainly support that.

I imagine how cost of living/inflation is calculated became a lot more complex in the past few years which skews the comparison. Especially because of cost of buying homes and cost of renting and greater disparity between rural and urban in the context of increasingly higher urban populations.

Also, predatory debt trapping, in part due to social media exposure and student loans, is way bigger thing now.

Activists love to use the Federal Minimum Wage, which has not increased in a long time (16 years), as their basis for that claim, ignoring how few workers are actually paid the Federal Minimum Wage. It's become a worthless metric for anything other than misleading arguments.

In addition to state and local governments setting their own minimums, the decline in young people and competition for workers in that sector from food delivery companies, has put wage pressure on fast food companies. Most wouldn't be able to open their doors if they tried to pay the Federal Minimum Wage. Had it been pegged to inflation, it would be $10.90/hour, which is less than what fast food workers are paid almost anywhere.

That's a study that underestimates growth in cost of living, i.e. gouging by rent seekers and businesses, and ignores changes in status, i.e. people leaving the job market or moving down to something worse. It's not surprising that the lowest income earners got a substantial boost in that period, since life is getting substantially more expensive. Importantly, I don't think their "real wage" inflation adjusted values are fair. People being told inflation was one amount when their actual CoL was vastly outpacing that was part of what fueled the anger that got Trump elected again, not that he has helped (or will help) anything since '23 where that analysis ends.

Anecdotally, many people I know would be in dire straits if they didn't own appreciating real property, because their cost of living adjustments at work aren't coming close to matching inflation. Others I know are actually in dire straits. Some are doing fine and getting the benefit of profitable work. Overall things have been awful economically post-COVID, and there are a lot of causal factors, from the policy decisions of the last decade, to the surprises of COVID, natural disasters and geopolitics, to the AI investment bubble and the changing zeitgeist. (Oh and let's not forget simple demographics, birth rate, etc...)