[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by opendoor

I'd be curious to see the data on that. Everything I've seen points to stagnant real income across most income levels. Median real income, median household income, and disposable income have all been flat or have declined in the last 4-5 years. GDP per capita has gone up, but given that income hasn't, that would suggest that any wealth that's getting generated is finding its way into asset prices rather than wages.

From the U.S. Treasury report:

As a result, earnings have outpaced increases in prices such that real wages have increased since before the pandemic. Real weekly earnings for the median worker grew 1.7 percent between 2019 and 2023.[3] This means that one week of pay for the median worker now buys more than a week of pay did in 2019, despite higher prices. Furthermore, as shown in Figure 1, the increases in earnings are by no means concentrated at the top: in fact, they skew toward the middle class and the lower end of the income distribution. The 25th percentile of the wage distribution saw their nominal weekly earnings grow by $143, from $611 in 2019 to $754 in 2023. When adjusted for inflation, this amounts to a 3.2 percent increase in real earnings.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/featu...9%20and%202023.

International comparison.

Spoiler!

From the Center for American Progress

In November 2023, nearly 6 in 10 workers (57 percent) earned higher annual inflation-adjusted wages than the year before, a share higher than its 2017–2019 pre-pandemic average. The median inflation-adjusted change in workers’ hourly earnings was about 45 cents, which translates to a more than $900 annual increase for a worker who works full time, year-round...

… Real average wage growth for a typical worker has seen the second-fastest recovery during this recession recovery of all five recession recoveries since 1980. Notably, the current economic recovery is the only one in which robust real wage growth has occurred in tandem with a rapid recovery of the unemployment rate.

https://www.americanprogress.org/art...y-than-prices/