https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XTtA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XTtA — I broke apart individual wages into quintiles and applied some rudimenta

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XTtA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XTtA — I broke apart individual wages into quintiles and applied some rudimentary inflation adjustment, and the result is definitely mixed. I would estimate this adds up to sub-1% total growth in wages over 40 years, but further math could determine the effective compounded growth rate from then until now. A wage disparity effect is apparent: the higher your quintile, the less likely you are to encounter wages decreases. (One could determine the inflation-adjusted wage 'thresholds' of each quintile per year to pursue that line of research further.) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XTuu https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XTuu — Household cash (green), household consumer credit debt (blue); % increase in debt service payments per year (red), % inflation (orange). When consumer credit was bulk-withdrawn during and after Covid, cash balances spiked as one would expect — but household debt service payments started growing faster than inflation, which is another indicator that households are accruing debt faster than they can pay it off — no one otherwise wants to incur 25-35% APR interest payments if they can avoid it. (The thin green line is Households sans Nonprofits, which I chose not to try and compensate for due to how small the difference is.)