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Comment by trolleski | Hacker News Reader

If you denominate your income in silly money such as USD, then it won't go down, probably will go up!

However if you start asking questions on how much housing medical and materials it buys, then I think it will squeeze people even more than now.

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That's what the "real" in "median real income" means. It measures how much stuff you can buy, not how much currency you have. And it's been going up relatively reliably: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n

Median is obviously flawed here. What should be looked at is wealth distribution.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and anyone with any power is doing their best to accelerate this trend.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

No, the poor are also getting richer: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLB50107

You're looking at what percent of the total wealth pie do the poor get. But the pie itself is growing, and so is _everyones_ slice of the pie.

Maybe you think its an inherent problem that some people get a bigger percent of the pie than others. But its objectively untrue to say that the poor are getting poorer.

That stat is not real income. The dollars don't matter if they buy less.

Actually, median is exactly what you want. It strips out outliers. It's the "middle of the pack" person. Mean is the one that would be skewed by outliers.

And "the poor are getting poorer" is simply untrue for the last 10 years. They had a pretty bad time from 1980 - 2015, but in the last 10 years, their real income has risen faster than any other quintile: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/growth-in-real-wages-over-t...

Median says very little about distribution and says almost nothing about how the tails are doing (which are real people that are easily ignored).

That page breaks about a second after loading. It's enough time to see the graphic, but not enough to see the methodology for data collection. Can you share how that data is collected? Afaik government sources do not track real income distribution.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0102M (47% increase since 2021)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0103M (26%)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0104M (23%)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0105M (22%)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0106M (17%)

Yes, the bottom quintile has a lot more variance, but the argument that the poor are being left behind has been really hard to make for the last 5 years. Coupled with high inflation, which erodes the savings of the rich, they're actually getting a bigger slice of the overall pie.

There's a case to be made for "real wages" not capturing what they're meant to capture though, at least if you look at housing [1].

And this isn't even considering the productivity growth over time having a widely asymmetrical distribution, ie not captured by the median person.

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-american-income-vs-...

And the reason for the death of the middle class is regulation that was purportedly to help reduce inequality, like all manner of taxes. I think the solution is obviously to keep trying. That's not the definition of insanity, that's good old fashioned human stupidity, and unlike AI stupidity, human stupidity gets reset back to 100% with every generation. No wonder history repeats itself.

Median is simply a 50/50 centrality measure. When you're dealing with a bimodal distribution you won't learn too much about it with median. So you need something else, e.g. Gini coefficient to characterize it.

As for the real, does it measure housing, insurance and medical as well? Does it measure the safety on the streets? Overall quality of life?

AI will strip what's left of the middle class to bare bones. And the tech lords will call it 'disruption', the fixated adolescents they are.

I agree.

After a decade of "quantitative easing" there is still a shitload of money looking for a spot in the economy that needs it. NFTs, bitcoin mining farms, AI data centers, FAANG stocks, real estate, gold ... These are hedges (or attempts to hedge), but they add little to no intrinsic value to the world's prosperity.

They merely shift and concentrate wealth and power, for the most part.

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