▲ | simianwords 2 days ago | |||||||
I investigated the first link with ChatGPT. All the percentiles have increased except 10th percentile. But they do not account for after tax wages and other benefits and transfers. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59510 shows this. Bottom 20% wages after accounting for benefits and taxes have significantly increased. If you want to answer the question: are the bottom 20% materially more well off at 1960's than now - this is your answer. Hourly wages without accounting for benefits is missing a crucial element so not really indicative of reality. Caveat: this shows the bottom quintile (20th percentile) and after looking at the data it appears to be a change of ~60% of real disposable income from 1978 to 2020. 10th percentile would be similar. TL;DR: if you use real disposable income that accounts for taxes and benefits (what really matters) the wages have not stagnated for anyone but increased a lot - by almost 60%. | ||||||||
▲ | GuinansEyebrows 2 days ago | parent [-] | |||||||
you're putting in a lot of work (well, i guess you're farming out the work to a third party service) to prove a portion of your argument with a metric that ignores inflation (including whatever you want to call what's happening right now). why? why is it so important to you to try to dispel a notion that is nearly-universally shared among scholars, experts and those actually experiencing ill effects due to the rise in costs of living compared to their income? | ||||||||
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