That's what the "real" in "median real income" means. It measures how much stuff you can buy, not how much currency you have. And it's been going up relatively reliably: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n

I agree.

After a decade of "quantitative easing" there is still a shitload of money looking for a spot in the economy that needs it. NFTs, bitcoin mining farms, AI data centers, FAANG stocks, real estate, gold ... These are hedges (or attempts to hedge), but they add little to no intrinsic value to the world's prosperity.

They merely shift and concentrate wealth and power, for the most part.

I think my concern would be if the relationship between model intelligence and inference cost was altered very significantly. I sort of feel like we got lucky that AI isn't arbitrarily scalable in a single instance

(i.e. if you could run a single LLM on an entire datacenter and it just immediately becomes a super genius versus running it on the minimum viable hardware i.e. some form of quantization on a local machine.)

Obviously there's a sort of goldilocks zone / most appropriate substrate for an LLM to run on somewhere in between those two extremes (small cluster of tightly coupled flagship GPUs)

So luckily enough the economics appear to work out to make that at least conceptually viable for even private members of the public to afford access to the same order of magnitude of LLM intelligence. But we're already seeing some departure from that.

My concern would be if this curve was altered significantly by a new algorithmic approach beyond or instead of Transformerd such that someone with $200,000 to spare could achieve just like a completely categorically different quality of work, massively magnify their existing wealth advantage, because this would be a threat of the sort being discussed above, namely a pathway to a severe form of modern Feudalism.

According to a random inflation calculator I found with a lazy Google search, $50,000 in 1996 is about $106,000 today.

Was $50,000 a lot of money in 1996? Did it afford a nice house in a good neighborhood? Or is it that 6 figures just isn't what it used to be?

Well, I think in the context of the parent comment, separating out housing would risk overstating changes in its effect on purchasing power because increases to housing would already be captured by inflation (since we're talking about real median income, which is already inflation adjusted)

I agree that housing affordability is a major problem and that looking at it independently could help you quantify if housing specifically has become more unaffordable, but that's a different question then whether the median person's overall purchasing power has declined (considering all of housing, healthcare food etc)

housing prices and health care are captured by the "real" part of "median real income". Inequality is not, but as long as everybody is getting richer, I'm less concerned about inequality.

Your assertion that it's "flat" is rather unconvincing after looking at that graph. It's clearly been rising relatively consistently. The dip for covid I think is especially understandable, and it's currently higher than it's ever been.

Maybe your personal expenses are not reflected by the CPI, but you can see for yourself: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2025.htm

44% housing, 8% medicine, 14% food. I don't see how these number are manipulated to the point of malicious data picking. They also publish their methodology.