It never does. This is just accelerating the pandemic-era wealth transfer that started with the rich getting trillions to prop up their assets while everyone else got $600.
The first thing in the article is a graph where 7 our of the 11 years shown have positive real wage growth.
If worker pay never kept up with inflation, the country would be among the world’s poorest.
https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/
The "distribution of family income" chart has been inflation adjusted. Note that for the bottom 10th and 50th percentiles, income has flatlined.
The 90th percentile income earners have seen their wages nearly double, after inflation adjustment.
> If worker pay never kept up with inflation, the country would be among the world’s poorest.
That is flat wrong. Even if you were still making 23$ an hour as you did in the 70's:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/50-years-of-us-wages-... https://www.factcheck.org/2019/06/are-wages-rising-or-flat/
...you'd still be among the top 20% of earners across the earth. Let's take another step down to simple minimum wage. over 7$/hr in the US puts you at... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_w... - in the top 20, which doesn't even include countries without a minimum wage.
Your statement about "among the world's poorest" requires revision.
I can't say his situation is entirely enviable, and I would not suggest using that statistic to tell him that he ought to be happy with his lot in life.
Except in 10 of the last 12 years, as you can clearly see in the same chart
Numbers are bad - "See everyone, things are fucked. I told you so." (which is what this post is about)
Numbers are good - "Meh, I never trust the underlying data anyways. It is all meaningless."
IMO, the problem isn't the CPI. The market is just fundamentally distorted because the government pumps money into real estate into subsidized loans.
Argument: It sort of is keeping up with the real thing (what you have to spend because we'll just take cpi) if you squint at a particular period? Actually it isn't, it's still being systematically underestimated.
CPI is a crap measure of what people actually face in increase of what they have to spend. What you can actually buy, the purchasing power of wages has not been going up. People aren't being fooled into be angry and bitter. Talk to them. Listen to what they say about their constraints in life. Ideally find some people you like for whom you can feel empathy with their situation.
I don't know about the exact methodology, but the concept makes sense to me. "Everyone" is buying food "everyday", so it's sensible to have, say, the price of bread included directly. On the other hand, "no one" is buying houses "everyday"; what people are buying everyday is housing, i.e. how much do you spend to have a roof over your head. This is correlated to house prices, but not that strongly. If you bought your house 30 years ago and the mortgage is paid, it doesn't matter whether houses next to you are suddenly worth 50% more, you're still going to pay the same for housing (except maybe due to taxes). If you're renting, it is going to track house prices, but not perfectly. Apparently, in the SF area, the average rent has actually slightly decreased since 2019, while the average house price has increased.
All of this means that while the average house price might have increased by x%, the average person (as in, if you aggregate those already owning a house, those renting, those buying houses now, ...) is not spending x% more on housing, so it makes sense to use a metric that follows the latter and not the former. Yes, if you're looking at buying a house, it means CPI is not very accurate for you, but then a single number is never going to perfectly fit everyone.
Zoom out a bit and you get something slightly more useful, which does support your argument, too: wages seem, in general, to keep up with inflation – though with lot of variation. https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-MA272_wages4_G...
The rich: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/17/fed-officials-owned-securiti...
- Powell held between $1.25 million and $2.5 million of municipal bonds. They were just a small portion of his total reported assets. While the bonds were purchased before 2019, they were held while the Fed last year bought more than $5 billion in munis, including one from the state of Illinois purchased by his family trust in 2016.
- Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren held between $151,000 and $800,000 worth of real estate investment trusts that owned mortgage-backed securities. He made as many as 37 separate trades in the four REITS while the Fed purchased almost $700 billion in MBS.
- Richmond Fed President Thomas Barkin held $1.35 million to $3 million in individual corporate bonds purchased before 2020. They include bonds of Pepsi, Home Depot and Eli Lilly. The Fed last year opened a corporate bond-buying facility and purchased $46.5 billion of corporate bonds.