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Notes -
They're not.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
While I agree in that in general Americans are incredibly prosperous in absolute terms real median household income doesn't really paint the full picture here.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881900Q (real male earnings)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252882800Q (real female earnings)
The growth in real median household income is, to my understanding, driven by more women entering the full-time workforce and the growth of highly-paid white collar service work (which the median woman is more suited to and which AI has a good chance to cannibalize soon) which doesn't benefit you one bit if you're a working class male who can't attract a white-collar partner.
Really, "prosperity" to most people means access to zero-sum things such as land in desirable areas, social status and the labor of other people. Access to those things has absolutely gone down for the median American worker in a world where wealth inequality keeps increasing and where other countries have become much wealthier relative to America, and where worst of all they keep getting blasted by social media about other people having it better than them 24/7.
Pretty much nobody cares that all but the very worst off Americans can afford a flat-screen tv, the total digital sum of human knowledge online and much more food than they could ever stomach even if that would have been unimaginable a few generations ago, all of that is just eaten up by the hedonic treadmill and they're still miserable because they're at the bottom of the totem pole and see no way up.
Maybe you could tell this story before the pandemic, but the pandemic and the aftermath have boosted male median wages too.
It clearly benefits the median American household, so either the median American household has a white collar woman or it's not just white collar woman whose wages are going up.
This is just by definition wrong to some extent, right? To the extent that status is determined by wealth, it isn't affected by wealth inequality. Elon is wealthier/higher status than me and would be if he was worth merely a hundred million rather than a hundred billion. The top 1% are going to buy the 1% most desirable real estate and the median American by definition cannot. Etc.
What has changed here with respect to real estate is that the number of 1%ers has increased in pace with the population. There's 50% more people in the country than there were in 1980 and the California coastline hasn't grown a bit. That means that the median American is living in a less desirable, in absolute terms, than the median American in 1980.
As far as buying others' labor, consumer goods have never been cheaper. Automation has made big strides and there's still countries with much lower wages than the US. Where this has become a problem is with domestic service industries like education, medicine, the trades, etc. but this may be partially an unavoidable effect of the productivity growth that drove down prices in other sectors.
The hedonic treadmill cuts both ways, the things that people think were so great about the imagined past were not considered so great by those living in the actual past. Being at the bottom of the totem pole sucks no matter what year it is.
I'd be interested to see demographics of new households adjusted for population growth. Just anecdotally and based off urban demographics, younger men are more likely to stay at home (especially if lower-earning or unpartnered) whereas the median woman is more likely to have moved out to an urban metro and gotten some sort of decently paying white-collar job.
Hence household income went up but there's still plenty of disaffected men who can't / won't make it in the white-collar world and see their real wages and status falling like a rock. I do agree that it's more accurate to say "real incomes have been down for a generation for many American workers" because if you had white-collar exposure you likely did very well in absolute terms over the last generation.
The issue is that even if they're much better off absolutely and can afford a huge amount of food, technology and clothing most of the things people care about when feeling rich are relative and simply can't be accessible to everyone.
This nails it on the head imo. Even for the median household that has done well in absolute terms they likely live in a smaller or less desirable location compared to their parents and their real wages, while they have gone up, have likely gone up less relative to the cost of domestic services and hence they feel poor because they've gone down the totem pole.
This is very true though. The issue is that nobody thinks they'll be the poor peasant who struggles to feed themselves and they all think they'd be in a higher class where property and domestic service was much cheaper in relative terms.
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