| ▲ | john01dav 15 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||
What basket of goods does your source use for determining income in real terms? The ratio of money on essentials versus luxuries has changed over the past few decades, and it's done so unevenly across the population. For example, a young person looking to find a place to live today is going to face astronomically higher rents while someone who bought 30 years ago in a place like California that caps property tax growth may find that their monthly (or total over a long time) housing cost is vastly lower. Whether real wages have gone down depends on what you use as a benchmark for said wages. The federal reserve even has an article about this topic: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/diff... | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | sobellian 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
You can look at the linked page. It uses "Income in 2024 C-CPI-U (2000-2024) and R-CPI-U-RS (pre-2000) adjusted dollars." I would be interested in a dataset that shows deflated household income over this same period using a reasonable basket of goods. The FRED dataset shows an increase of roughly a third. It would take a very large adjustment to knock that down to significantly negative growth. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | kelseyfrog 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||
While we can find extreme examples, we should be hesitant to conclude that they are a representative sample of the population. We should let outliers update our beliefs about means and medians very little to none for population level values. What analysis that has been done of disparate inflation points out: > The cost of medical care has more than quintupled since 1983, growing almost twice as fast as the overall price level. The BLS calculates that people 62 and older devote 11 percent of spending to medical care, while the general population devotes 8 percent. Figure 4 shows basket-share differences between older adults and the general population, and the price changes for those categories over the past 10 years. Loading figure 4... > Older adults also spend considerably more on housing (49 percent versus 45 percent for the general population). They spend relatively less in other major categories, including food and transportation, that had lower rates of inflation than medical care and housing. https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2024/breaking-down-in... | |||||||||||||||||
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