> FRED data shows that median real wages were essentially flat from 1979 to 2015ish Yeah that makes sense. Precipitous drop in real wages since the 60s though

> FRED data shows that median real wages were essentially flat from 1979 to 2015ish Yeah that makes sense. Precipitous drop in real wages since the 60s though is a pretty big claim that deserves quite a bit of scrutiny before just being accepted as brute fact. > offsets steep increases in the price of necessities like housing, education, and healthcare with hedonic adjustments for higher quality cars, TVs, and phones. Right but the offset is proportional to the monetary amount spent right (I also don't believe cars actually get a hedonic adjustment but I may be misremembering)? That is for steep increases in housing, education, and healthcare to be offset by hedonic adjustments in TVs and phones, roughly the same amount of money would be spent on housing, education, and healthcare, as on TVs and phones (or would need astronomically large hedonic adjustments). That being said housing, education, and healthcare have indeed seen steep inflation-adjusted increases in costs, but I interpret that to mean a widespread low rate of increase in costs for the rest of the basket, which includes clothing, food, and the like (which is not necessarily a good thing, it would probably be a good thing to say triple the price of electronics if that could result in healthcare costs staying stable).