Don't get me wrong, I'm not even disputing your main point-- I do agree that things have gotten better for the average American over the last decades. Though I

Don't get me wrong, I'm not even disputing your main point-- I do agree that things have gotten better for the average American over the last decades. Though I still think that longer-term inflation adjustment (CPI based comparisons even more so) always warrant a critical look. > Yes, housing supply should be much more abundant. The constraint on supply has not been the 1%, but government regulation through zoning and environmental restrictions. I'm not buying the whole "regulation is to blame for rising housing costs" at all. If it was, I would expect countless "housing havens": states/nations in the US/Europe with "correct regulation" and housing costs at least staying stable over the last decades: But I don't see those. My take on this is that this is mainly a consequence of the Baumol effect; local-labor intensive products like houses, childcare, education suffer from strongly rising costs because wages increased generally; regulation cant/wont magically solve this. But if you just compare wage development itself, things look much better over time than they actually are for the average person, because you omit this effect from your consideration by design. So things actually improved much less for the average American than a first glance at your numbers suggests.