zlacker

This is probably heavily affected by at least two things:

1. increase in healthcare costs and how health insurance is bound to employment

2. increase in wealth concentration and a shift from cash compensation to asset compensation (Bezos is only absurdly rich if he liquidates his Amazon holding instantly)

So, I would say your portrayal of hourly compensation is disingenuous as well. All of these statistics probably need to be calculated as medians instead of means ("compensation per hour" sounds suspiciously like "total compensation / total hours", which is a mean) in order for it to come close to accurately describing the situation of the median American, because wealth concentration has skewed the mean American into something a lot more optimistic than one would think.

>>citati+(OP)
I agree averages can be misleading. As the joke goes when Bill Gates walks into a bar suddenly everybody's a billionaire, on average! At the same time medians can also be misleading. We have 50 people earning $10, 1 earning $100, and 50 earning $200. We swap to a system where we have 50 people earning $90, 1 earning $100, and 50 earning $300. There would have been a major shift upward with nearly everybody seeing major increases in earning, yet the median would not have shifted at all.

This [1] is the real median personal income. The data there only starts at 1974 but you once again see a 32% increase in income. Now factor in the change in hours worked. The average American works more than 100 less hours then back then. [2]. These numbers combined along with arguing that most people only saw a real increase in wages of 12% is simply not possible, nor is it possible to simply attribute all growth to the rich.

Now there is this [3]. The numbers from that paper are really what made me start digging into all of this stuff. To give the long and short of it - the poor are becoming middle class, and the middle class are becoming rich. With the net effect being a major decline in the number of poor, a major increase in the number of rich, and a small decline in the number of middle class. Probably not coincidentally, not entirely dissimilar to the hypothetical I proposed where the median can end up being misleading. These 'nobody except the rich are seeing more money' articles seem to be simply untrue, but they are click magnets.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

[2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USAAHWEP

[3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16952930

>>TangoT+ac
This is a very challenging view-point, and I appreciate the effort you've put into backing it up. I think my biggest hesitation of accepting its results is the difference between annual income and wealth. By this study's standard, I'm nearly upper-middle-class, but I have a negative net-worth due to student loans. If my employment status came into question, I would be very quickly impoverished, and would have to rely on many social and governmental safety nets. Can this really be considered rich?

Maybe I'm an outlier as an individual in my mid-20s, but it's enough to make me question the definition of class on annual income.

>>citati+YW
Did you know that 72% of people with at least $1-$5 million of investable assets do not consider themselves rich> As that article mentions even multi millionaires are also constantly concerned about losing it all. Your situation does not change, at least not for many people. The numbers and reasons might, but not the general concern. Consider the ostensibly rich person with a fancy house, a beach house for holidays, a couple of luxury cars, and a couple of kids he's paying through Harvard. In reality that often translates into two mortgages, two car bills, and another $150k a year for college. It's the same scenario there. Until that wealth is 'consolidated', if his income slips up his life is going to be devastated. It's only the ultra wealthy one can start to become divorced from financial concern or even outright risk of ruin. And I think the fact that we can realistically set that as a goal ourselves now a days is probably a sign something good has been happening over the years.

[1] - https://abcnews.go.com/Business/study-28-percent-millionaire...