If things are not getting harder then either they stay the same or get better. I would find it hard to argue for either of those positions, but I would welcome you to try to defend that "things are not getting harder". In just about every possible metric outside of maybe "few really, really wealthy individuals make more money" things are not getting better or are stable.
Are you maybe suggesting that what is good for an individual is not good for society?
Income inequality in the US hasn't increased since 2014 and is sharply decreased since 2019. Lower income people are making more money than ever. There was a period of no income growth for upper-middle class people, however, which probably made them unhappy.
What did happen in the last two years was there was a "vibecession" where everyone decided to pretend the economy was bad even though everything about it was objectively good. You can see this in surveys, because everyone answered them with "I'm personally doing well, but I know everyone else is doing badly because I heard it on the news".
Note, this was written at the tail end of the inflation period and none of the predictions of bad things quoted in the article actually happened.
Of course, that's the story up to the end of 2024. All kinds of bad things can happen now - I can't tell you about the future, but the present is easier.
Ok. First, the 1st paper is interesting, but I can't digest it now. Added to the list for later.
That said, temporarily ignoring the paper, income in absolute terms may have well increased, but from 2014 to 2024 we also had ~33% official CPI inflation ( edit: which is well above FED's goal ), which effectively eroded any gains average person may have managed to eke out. In other words, it is not a vibe whem that 100k+ is getting you ~33% less. It is simply what things are.
<< Of course, that's the story up to the end of 2024. All kinds of bad things can happen now - I can't tell you about the future, but the present is easier.
I am not hopeful, but I am willing to accept it as a possible outcome.
<< Don't insult my intelligence like that. I would never quote nominal income to you. My post was inflation adjusted.
Apologies. Let me look at the link provided.
I am going through the paper now and the things that did jump at me that while you state that your post was inflation adjusted and I will admit that I am not sure it says what you claim to think it says. Lets go over relevant passages.
From quoted paper[1]:
"Wage compression was accompanied by rapid nominal wage growth and rising job-to-job separations—especially among young non-college (high school or less) workers.
Comparing across states, post-pandemic labor market tightness became strongly predictive of real wage growth among low-wage workers (wage-Phillips curve), and aggregate wage compression."
In other words, higher absolute values were considered to be good predictors for wage-phillips curve ( which shows a relationship between the unemployment rate and wage growth ). I worry that you saw word real wage and made an assumption that it measures real wage. It doesn't. We can argue whether it is a good proxy, but from get go it is tougher sell. In other words, if methodology for attempting to derive real wage is off, the whole premise falls apart from where I sit.
"Moreover, despite substantial post-pandemic inflation–measured with the benchmark Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers (CPI-U)–real hourly earnings
at the 10th percentile of the wage distribution rose by 7.8% between January 2020 and June 2023."
Ok. This is where it does get messy, because I genuinely do not want to get into the weeds here, but lets... for the sake of the argument assume all that including methodology is fine.
"Real US hourly wages rose by approximately 10 percentage points at all percentiles during the first quarter of the Covid-19 pandemic, from March through June of 2020. (As we show below, much of this spike reflected a change in composition of the workforce as low-wage workers disproportionately lost their jobs.) Thereafter, these quantiles diverged. The 10th wage percentile held its real value over the next three years, while the 50th and 90th real wage percentiles fell by around 6 and 8 percentage points, respectively. In net, the 90/10 ratio declined by about 8 percentage points over these three years "
In other words, for the period of time listed, assuming we accept the premise, methodology and so on, wages rose above inflation. And then, those same real wages fell on average of 8% between July 2000 and 2024. I don't know man, it sounds me, again if we accept premise, methodology and so, as if things got briefly better and got worse again. So my example of 100k became 92K..
FWIW, I am really curious of how you will defend it.
> Are you maybe suggesting that what is good for an individual is not good for society?
I don't read any such suggestion into the person's post; to me, it seems to mean what it says. As to whether individual needs and societal needs always align, I would guess you probably know the answer is "no" -- but also far from "never"
If things are not getting harder then either they stay the same or get better. I would find it hard to argue for either of those positions, but I would welcome you to try to defend that "things are not getting harder". In just about every possible metric outside of maybe "few really, really wealthy individuals make more money" things are not getting better or are stable.
Are you maybe suggesting that what is good for an individual is not good for society?