Take a look at how the median American lives compared to the median resident of nearly every country on earth. If that's suffering, I'm not sure what to call li

Take a look at how the median American lives compared to the median resident of nearly every country on earth. If that's suffering, I'm not sure what to call life elsewhere. And to this specific comment, wages outpaced inflation since the 1970s for everyone but the poorest households (I believe the bottom 10% are the exception, who I would probably agree are suffering in some sense). Working class real wage growth actually outpaced white collar real wage growth for a couple years post-COVID, for the first time in a long time. Also, wage measurements don't normally measure total compensation, notably health insurance which has been increasing much faster than wages or overall inflation for decades. Also, there's no reason to expect wage growth to match productivity growth. Productivity gains are largely due to company investment, not increased effort from workers, and household expenses are not positively correlated with productivity metrics.