This thought occurred to me too, but then I realized even 37% is very high. In a reasonable society, most individuals' earnings should go up all the time. The downward pressure that should exist is high earners retiring and low earners just starting their career. A mildly idealized society should probably have 3% go from unemployed to employed, 3% go from employed to (voluntarily) unemployed, and the remaining 94% increase their earnings.

Nothing is "idealized" in the real world forever.

The only thing that surprised me about this article is that more people didn't see real wages decline. 2021-2024 was a period of peak inflation that the US hadn't seen in decades. And of course the primary cause of this inflation was governments flooding dollars into the market by literally paying people not to work, which while perhaps faulty was at least a reasonable response to Covid. The ironic thing is that, in the US at least, the inflation rate was coming down before we decided to install the guy who instituted massive tariffs, an unprecedented deportation program, and an unprovoked war in Iran, all of which are highly inflationary.

So it's completely unsurprising to me that wages, especially of people who stayed in the same job, didn't accelerate faster than inflation. This feels a bit like picking your dates to tell a narrative. I'd be much more interested in the percentage of folks whose wages fell in real terms by looking at multiple overlapping 5 year timespans.