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Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

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