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Your first graph for Median usual weekly real earnings shows a fall from 393 in Q2 2020 to 365 in Q2 2023. Your third graph for Real Median Household Income sh
by quadrifoliate 3y ago
Your first graph for Median usual weekly real earnings shows a fall from 393 in Q2 2020 to 365 in Q2 2023.
Your third graph for Real Median Household Income shows a fall from 76,660 in 2020 to 74,580 today.
Even though I find it hard to take the reported inflation numbers seriously because they aren't calculated off a fixed basket of goods any more [1], those graphs don't seem to say we have more "real" wages now compared to 2020. I am confused as to why you seem to be arguing for the opposite. Am I reading them wrong or something?
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[1] From https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/consumerpriceindex.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/consumerpriceindex.... — "The new methodology takes into account changes in the quality of goods and the effects of substitution. Substitution, the changes consumers make in response to price increases, also changes the relative weighting of the goods in the basket. The overall result tends to be a lower CPI."
- ajross 3y agoYou're cherry picking the peak (literally the peak) of the covid relief though! People got huge checks in the first half of 2020, do you not remember? Why would you do that? You can see it's an outlier, growing rapidly then shrinking. Look at Q4 2019 to get pre-covid numbers and you'll see (1) there's a clear trend across the disruption and (2) it's clearly going up.
- quadrifoliate 3y agoOkay, but then Real Median Income still goes down from 78,250 in 2019 to 74,580. You probably shouldn't go too far before Covid. People aren't going to think back to how things were ~5 years before Covid, they are going back to a couple years before.