According to the Census Bureau, median earnings since 1980 look like this:
Overall income is up 53% since 1980, but that's driven by wildly different growth rates among men (+19%) and women (+102%).
There are plenty of other ways to slice and dice this. You can look at household income. You can look at income by race. You can look at income by age group. Take your pick, depending on what you're interested in.
It's worth noting that Census income, which is basically just cash wages, is about the same at the median as CBO income, which includes taxes and government benefits. The median earner has benefited a little bit from lower taxes since 1980, but that's all. Government benefits go almost entirely to workers below the median.
My first job after graduation from college in 1987 paid about $29000 a year. In 2021 I made 5 times that. Am I dragging up the average?
No, you are revealing one of the limitations of these types of statistics, namely: people inhabit different quintiles at different stages of their lives.
It is clearly more problematic if these sorts of stories (eg the income behavior of different quintiles over time) were EQUIVALENT to the experience of individuals over time. However that is mostly not so, substantially for the reasons you indicate.
To create a (clearly drastically simplified) model:
imagine that everyone in the lowest quintile is aged 15 to 30, and the income of this quintile has stood still for 50 years because of the reduction of teen employment and more years spent in school, but people grow older than 30 and move into a higher quintile, which has seen more growth. Is this problematic? Or is it just a consequence of more time spent not working while young?
Unfortunately most of the people whose business it is to drive outrage over income statistics do not want this sort of thing to be understood, and so deliberately choose measures that obscure these sorts of points rather than measures that would clearify them.
It *is* possible that things are going terribly badly for large swathes of the US work force. But the stats trotted out to "prove" this claim are not in fact statistics capable of showing this. And the fact that these ARE the statistics trotted out suggests that the better measures do not, in fact, show the story that the chattering classes want us to believe...
This same mechanism is *probably* relevant to the graph being shown here; that it doesn't reflect either "finally women being paid what they are worth" OR "men yet again being screwed";
rather it probably reflects transition from a society with few women in jobs in the upper half of the pay range (professionals, C-suite, and so on) to a society with closer to equal participation in such jobs.
Well to be partially fair to the Outrage Activists of populist variety, largely Left and also some on the Right, general innumeracy is likely an perfectly valid general explainer rather than conscious deception and number picking. Not that it is an either-or choice, but one should not underestimate the pure innumeracy and "maths&stats is hard" factor.
But the Age Cohort / Generational commentary - oft done without even adjusting for inflation, of course is often a related bit of innumerate bollocks.
It is to be fair relatively complex to present (but it is a complex problem) to both compare age-cohorts income performance in equivalent period of time - the 20-25 yr olds of say 1980s to those of 2010s, but also to have such data to differentiate between the portion that are school leavers, to university etc.
It rather also reinforces Drum's other point relative to racial/ethnic versus class programmes, insofar as racial/ethnic data very much really are stalking horses for class (of course discrimination is a contributor to non-dominant ethnicities being overweighted to lower economic classes): the times when it is bothered to break out economic class within the broad ethnic categories for various factors rather highlight a high although imperfect correspondence of the issues. Better politics for sustainability to go for deracialising or de-ethnicising programmes for broader buy-in.
Thanks for your detailed reply. I used an inflation calculator and saw that my $29000 salary adjusted for inflation would be $70-75 k. My current salary is double that. So what does that mean for policy? I have no idea. I think it means that the way I’ve managed my education and career over the years has been pretty effective. I still wish I’d won the lottery!
An interesting question not easily addressed by Kevin's graph nor by your comments is why do so many people feel like they've been left behind over the past x years. It could be just an over eager media repeatedly reporting the bad news of the moment as opposed to longer term trends. This has certainly pertained to the issue of crime which was going down for the better part of 30 years which seemed to have little impact on the public perception. So, is the perception that many have that the average person has lost ground, or at least been left behind relative to the very top accurate ? Superficially Kevin's graph, as well as the census data as well as Justin's experience over the past 30+ would suggest not. But humans also compare themselves to other humans so the fact that the median has gone up may be less important than the fact that is has not kept pace with productivity or GDP growth and this is splashed in front of people every day by what they see on TV and in the media in general where displays of wealth are shown as normal. Why aren't you driving a Mercedes or living in a large and lovely home like the folks on Modern Family ? Here area couple links that may underline this point:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_GDP_per_capita_vs_median_household_income.png
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
The issue you raise is EXACTLY the same as when people are asked how happy they are with their congressional representative (something they have at least marginal knowledge of) vs how happy they are with congress as a whole.
People have NO idea about the "satisfaction level" of the country as a whole, and asking them that is pointless; all you'll get back is a reflection of what people think they are supposed to believe.
What you CAN do is ask people how satisfied they are with their lives and turns out they are pretty darn satisfied:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1672/satisfaction-personal-life.aspx
(This is, BTW, yet another area where, if you insist on slicing the data more finely than movements of about 10% [something I consider idiotic, but whatever] you have to take cohort effects, and thus the aging of the country, into account given that most of what determines people's satisfaction is not econo-political but things like the optimism of youth, mid-life crises, physical pain as you approach death, that sort of thing)
There's no doubt that people are not all that aware of anything beyond their own immediate concerns. Justin is in fact evidence of that. He pointed out that he's making a lot more money now than he was when he started his career 35 years ago. but that's hardly a surprise nor all that pertinent to Kevin's graphs . Then you say :
"you are revealing one of the limitations of these types of statistics, namely: people inhabit different quintiles at different stages of their lives. "
Huh ? What type of statistics ? What's your point exactly ? That people move up in the quintiles as they age ? So what. If you are suggesting that there are more young people or more old sick people not earning as much as old people of yore or something that this is somehow distorting "median" then I think you should say so and provide some evidence. Otherwise it seem like like you're doing a lot of handwaving about cohorts without providing a real argument.
It fits into a broad explanation of where we are now. The position of the most privileged group has stagnated while the position of women has caught. There are two words for this, progress and justice. But subjectively, emotionally, stagnation does not feel good. People like to feel they are on an upward trendline. These feelings overpower a dispassionate analysis of the actual situation.
We are in a massive backlash, and it is too early to tell where we will emerge.
The key to resolving the situation is income inequality. There is plenty of money sloshing around in the economy so Kevin's median income graph could have a very different shape, with women rising faster than men, but men rising smartly. In that counterfactual any backlash would have a lot less emotion behind it.
The irony, as always, is that men, especially white men, are the greatest obstacle to the "political revolution" sought by politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Rather more importantly, humas, being nothing more or less than rather overclocked Chimpanzees, are somewhat hard wired biologically to have some unbalanced reactions to resource changes (or access to resource changes):
* Relative status changes are keenly felt
* Loss is felt much more keenly than gain.
Deviations from cold mathematical logic, although one can hypothesize rational biological roots (such as in a primate band at subsistance survival, the downside risk of a food resource loss indeed would generally be more threatening than upside gain).
This all matters for political strategy as you will have an outsized reaction from Relative Losers than you will from Relative Gainers. This is now fairly well-documented in behavioural economics.
And insofar as the Electorate that Actually Votes is going to be impacted in specific ways, relative resource/status loss is something a smart political strategy is going to want to address, in ways more clever and vote-gaining favourable than "Get over it, priviledged white boys" - entirely abstracting whether such is logically merited.
The "White Supremacy" is seen as blaming minorities for all things. One of those things, though not directly voiced, is the rise of woman--more economic power and growing wages.
Traditional families depend on the woman's income--and that upsets some. Back in the day, women could hold office jobs in gov't or schools with good benefits and the husband could be an independent contractor to bring home money. But those contracting jobs are not always where the family is and now they have to buy in to their spouses insurance plans--so their take home pay has taken a hit. Not sure how that plays out in economic statistics--free benefits via spouse, which may not easily get picked up, to having to pay for benefits (or go without).
The sad thing is that Obamacare mitigated some of the damages this trend was causing, but probably has been blamed for the trend. I'm sure that's what HR would do--oh no, we don't want to change insurance policies--it's Obamacare. With the most problems in states that refused Medicaid expansion.
Rise of women only relates continuing the capitalistic debt game. White supremacy??? More like Semitic philosophy. Destroying capitalism and Christ, "white men" will create the greatest genocide the world has ever seen in its wake. The 2 C's are the only thing holding it back.
Ignorance is your friend moron.
I’m not sure what this chart shows or means. Perhaps jobs not open to women in 1980 are now open to them and thus they are making more money?
I can tell you this. I remember getting my first job with the LA County Probation Department. My salary in 1977 was $777.91. That job today pays almost the exact same amount, adjusted for inflation. But in those days it was almost exclusively men doing that work. Much different nowadays I gather.
The Guardian has an interesting article--what the wealthy think is the average wage:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/22/the-super-rich-live-on-a-different-planet-their-thoughts-on-us-salaries-prove-it
"Now, clearly, this is just an informal poll broadcast on Twitter; it’s not a peer-reviewed scientific study."
But of course, when it says something that "we" want to believe, it's greeted as eagerly as an anti-vaxxer jumps on the latest ivermectin news.
If Fox News were making equivalent claims based on equivalent data, Kevin would, rightly, be mocking them mercilessly.
There really is no different in behavior between the average leftist and the average rightist; they're both as smooth-brained as a pool-ball.
Ideologues are ideologues.
Thanks for the Guardian article. Here's another of interest:https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/
It shows that Kevin's data doesn't go back far enough. Adjusted for inflation, wages haven't caught up with 1973.
My understanding is that the real wage of black men have caught up a little bit with white men since 1970. Women have come closer to catching up, but still have a long way to go. But the target, inflation adjusted wages of full time white men, has never been as high as it was in 1973. In fact, for most of the nearly five decades since then, it has been substantially less than in 1973.
So wages for everyone except the top 1% or so, have really gone nowhere since 1973. Another thing is that wages, including the minimum wage, used to track with productivity growth. If the 1968 minimum wage had kept tract with inflation it would be about $14/hr now. If it had kept track with productivity it would be around $25/hr. Yeah, everyone's got reasons to be irritable.
As a black man told me: women only have to do, three things: feed me, fuck me and most importantly, shut the hell up.
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From about 1980, more women started entering the workforce. At about the same time, we started enforcing the Civil Rights Act more aggressively.
So women's income increased because more of them were working, and were working higher paying jobs, as well as getting promotions.