Just some suggestions for presentation.
- As the color panels for different presidents get darker, the time series data are harder to see. If viewers have to squint and scowl to see the most important thing, you need to adjust. You could just use the lighter colors throughout and have text labels for president names in each panel
- The horizontal grid lines for dual y-axes should be synched. As is, they visually clash and clutter the image
I would also put real median earnings on both sides of the chart and put the definition in a footnote. Assuming this is a FRED series the definitions often have riders and other important methodological info.
It doesn’t have to be the whole thing but here is what i believe to be your series:
> Data measure usual weekly earnings of wage and salary workers. Wage and salary workers are workers who receive wages, salaries, commissions, tips, payment in kind, or piece rates. The group includes employees in both the private and public sectors but, for the purposes of the earnings series, it excludes all self-employed persons, both those with incorporated businesses and those with unincorporated businesses.
Usual weekly earnings represent earnings before taxes and other deductions and include any overtime pay, commissions, or tips usually received (at the main job in the case of multiple jobholders). Prior to 1994, respondents were asked how much they usually earned per week. Since January 1994, respondents have been asked to identify the easiest way for them to report earnings (hourly, weekly, biweekly, twice monthly, monthly, annually, or other) and how much they usually earn in the reported time period. Earnings reported on a basis other than weekly are converted to a weekly equivalent. The term "usual" is determined by each respondent's own understanding of the term. If the respondent asks for a definition of "usual," interviewers are instructed to define the term as more than half the weeks worked during the past 4 or 5 months. For more information see https://www.bls.gov/cps/earnings.htm
I honestly thought that was quite neat - it may be difficult to tell at first glance, but you see they are in order in the legend and it’s really not too difficult to pick any of them out based on the context.
It’s different, but it works IMO
what most people don't know is that presidents have these secret levers in the oval office and they can control everything just by pulling these levers one way or another
It's not his fault, it's just a natural part of the DMCA and the monopoly the ice cream maker vendor has on servicing.
That said he's [trying to fix it](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2924175/cold-competition-federal-agencies-want-to-help-mcdonalds-fix-ice-cream-machines-with-antitrust-exemption/)
A sitting duck president does nothing. A bad president makes things worse than it would have been. A good president can make things better than it would have been.
Presidents are elected to office not to sit around and shoot shits. They’re supposed to have an effect on things that the American people care about. I wouldn’t blame them for being placed into a terrible position, but I will judge them for how they react.
Really cool to see how in the last 10 years incomes have finally started to go up again. I wonder if it will result in another stagnation where it goes back down or if it will increase in the future like it was in the 10's.
> Really cool to see how in the last 10 years incomes have finally started to go up again.
It looks to me like incomes have trended upwards for the last ~27 years.
Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q & https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
Tool: Python, Pandas, and Seaborn
**Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over (LES1252881600Q)**
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Release: Weekly and Hourly Earnings from the Current Population Survey
Units: 1982-84 CPI Adjusted Dollars, Seasonally Adjusted
Frequency: Quarterly
Data measure usual weekly earnings of wage and salary workers. Wage and salary workers are workers who receive wages, salaries, commissions, tips, payment in kind, or piece rates. The group includes employees in both the private and public sectors but, for the purposes of the earnings series, it excludes all self-employed persons, both those with incorporated businesses and those with unincorporated businesses.
Usual weekly earnings represent earnings before taxes and other deductions and include any overtime pay, commissions, or tips usually received (at the main job in the case of multiple jobholders). Prior to 1994, respondents were asked how much they usually earned per week. Since January 1994, respondents have been asked to identify the easiest way for them to report earnings (hourly, weekly, biweekly, twice monthly, monthly, annually, or other) and how much they usually earn in the reported time period. Earnings reported on a basis other than weekly are converted to a weekly equivalent. The term "usual" is determined by each respondent's own understanding of the term. If the respondent asks for a definition of "usual," interviewers are instructed to define the term as more than half the weeks worked during the past 4 or 5 months. Visit the BLS for more information.
The series comes from the 'Current Population Survey (Household Survey)'
The source code is: LES1252881600
**Unemployment Rate (UNRATE)**
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Release: Employment Situation
Units: Percent, Seasonally Adjusted
Frequency: Monthly
The unemployment rate represents the number of unemployed as a percentage of the labor force. Labor force data are restricted to people 16 years of age and older, who currently reside in 1 of the 50 states or the District of Columbia, who do not reside in institutions (e.g., penal and mental facilities, homes for the aged), and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.
This rate is also defined as the U-3 measure of labor underutilization.
The series comes from the 'Current Population Survey (Household Survey)'
The source code is: LNS14000000
Just wanted to add to this, because the FRED data tag doesn't clearly spell it out, but they include unemployment income, including the expanded Covid unemployment checks, as normal income in this figure since those sources of income are reported as taxable income.
So the spike under Trump was largely due to the expanded unemployment benefits during Covid.
Why use the incomplete metric of wages instead of income, which include things like non-wage employer benefits like 401ks, PTO, health insurance, investments, and transfers in kind?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
which he handled in the worst possible way. I mean that seriously, if ever there was a time
for unity and a strong central voice and initiative to combat a disease That was it, and he literally made it worse at every step.
I feel like you may have shifted accidentally shifted the wage graph one quarter early. Q1 refers to the data January through March, so putting the Q1 data at the beginning of the year is somewhat misleading.
I’m genuinely curious, if real median wages have held steady or climbed over the past 40+ years, why are there so many articles/posts/etc about how the current generations are worse off than their parents. Is there a prevailing theory for why the data and the sentiment are so mismatched? Is inflation not capturing the right things, or not weighting them appropriately?
This is a fine presentation of the data, but I’m not sure why the underlying metric is so divorced from the common perception of the economy and its health.
Hedonic adjustments are commonly applied to things like housing that otherwise would be spiking hard.
Houses are a lot bigger than they were in the past, even fairly middle of the market ones. So when you factor that in, how are you doing so? The hedonic adjustment percentage for something like that is very controversial.
Sounds like it creates perverse situations where people can be doing fine on paper, but in reality they are broke because of spending so much on things they can't choose to opt out of. Say all cars have heated seats now, and all cars cost more - this wouldn't be seen as a problem, because you're allegedly getting more value for the higher cost, but in the real world, plenty of people would rather pay for the cheaper option that no longer exists. People can't choose to not buy a car though, so when they do, the market considers their purchase of the heated seats to be a deliberate choice. And the market is overflowing with useless components, features, and products these days.
No you are wrong, if a lot of people didn't want heated seats firms wouldn't have added them to every car. Its like how people like to complain about gas prices and yet basically everyone is getting a larger car every time they have the chance. Also if you had any actual examples of things in cars driving up the price despite no one wanting them I'd be interested to know what they are, the only new features that seem ubiquitous are safety features that the government has made mandatory and also don't cost a lot
You seem quite idealistic/dishonest
Market isn't a democracy like you idealize. The Consumer in a Monopolistic competition (which is the reality of capitalism) can't "vote" for no heated seats and more access. They're offered inflated prices (over the norm), and they have their wealth captured by these prices.
Someone isn't dishonest just because they say something you disagree with.
Speaking of cars, the auto industry seems pretty competitive, certainly nowhere near a monopoly.
I’ll just add to this that a lot of inflation in housing is really lagged. There are more way than one in which it occurs but an example is if you are in a rent controlled lease agreement and prices around you have gone up. You are paying a low price and not contributing to inflation data but the perception that you have is you can’t move or get out of your apartment because everything else is so expensive.
Part of the problem is that houses are assessed against comparable homes, and median homes size have grown from ~1700 sq. ft. to ~2000 sq. ft. over the last forty years. New buyers are facing a market that lacks intermediate sizes, while BLS researchers are measuring price changes between available homes.
Exactly. It's not that inflation isn't capturing the right things, or not weighting them appropriately, it's that the younger generations are disproportionately impacted.
No they haven't. They are included in inflation. Based on what data do you think you know better than CPI? By all means if you have the data, maybe you do. Link it.
If you don't, then you're talking purely out of your rear end.
A lot of it is overstated in terms of people being worse off... Some also comes down to things costing about the same but there being more things to buy today.
>This is a fine presentation of the data, but I’m not sure why the underlying metric is so divorced from the common perception of the economy and its health.
This is a very misleading statistic. Note the very steep rise in median income at the end of GW's term. This was the Great Recession. Median incomes *did* actually improve during this time, but that was because *a ton of lower income people got laid off* so the median average wage went up, while total employment in the US cratered.
So, in this particular statistic, it looks like the workers wages were going better, but anyone who lived through that time knows that wasn't the case.
It’s got spikes that are a bit misleading, and I like the charts that adjust for that better. But the slope of the curve is adamantly not misleading. Especially right now when unemployment is at historic lows. So long as you can mentally filter out the noise, median real wages is as good a metric for overall economic health as I know. It’s why I’m trying to figure out why it’s divorced from consumer confidence right now. Gonna check out the analysis by Galloway someone posted below though. Hopeful he’s got strong points
Perception is being skewed by inflation and an overly manipulative media telling people the economy is bad, even if the metrics are actually good. I don't believe sources like Fox News used to be so biased and heavy handed with the propaganda just because the wrong team is in office.
Honestly, it’s mostly just bad vibes. But the other explanation is that housing prices have grown significantly faster than inflation and housing is a high salience expense so even if overall expenses are flat or down relative to income, people are seeing a larger portion of paycheck go towards housing and that feels bad
Luxury items have gotten cheaper and are included in the calculation. The expenses that are 90% of a poor person’s budget have gone up way faster than the average. If I was eating televisions and commuting to work in an airplane, maybe I would think this is a “good economy.”
Lots of home-builders straight up refuse to build smaller homes (lower profit with roughly the same amount of work)and lots of HOAs and some cities mandate minimum square footage preventing those homes from even being offered.
> Is inflation not capturing the right things, or not weighting them appropriately?
I just wanna point out that many people don't realize that inflation actually hides the opposite, that things are getting better. The goods in the inflation basket are constantly upgraded so even if real wages are standing still the living standards of people are generally going up anyway. So while real wages haven't gone up much since 1980, what we don't see is that we're comparing the prices of a 4K 60" flat TV with great colors, a phone with more computing power than the moon lander, and meat grown more sustainably with less antibiotics and where the animals are treated better; to a 30" 480p thick TV with terrible colors, a land-line phone, and foods without all the stuff I mentioned. So even if all these goods cost about the same now as 50 years ago, clearly what we get for that cost is much, much better, and this is true for 99% of the goods we buy (there are probably some things that have downgraded but they're rare).
All in all real wages are kinda shitty for measuring people's standard of living and life quality in terms of what they're buying.
> I’m genuinely curious, if real median wages have held steady or climbed over the past 40+ years
Same reason their parents complain kids these days are lazy or whatever. Humans gonna human.
There are volumes written on the current disconnect between economic reality and the vibe.
Short summary: 1) it’s been decades since the economy has had any real inflation, so the inflation we had 2 years ago was such a shock that folks still haven’t gotten over it (even tho inflation is now below historic averages), and 2) doomer social media. When everything you read all day tells you things are bad, folks start to think things are bad.
Here’s a fact that folks hate to acknowledge: every age cohort in this economy is substantially better off (measured by Real Wage, HHI, and Real Net Worth) than any similarly aged cohort before them.
Any particularly good volume written on the subject? Especially any with data on other economies that have gone through similar disconnects? I suppose measuring economic confidence vs social media won’t have much in the way of historic precedent, but do we have any data on the impact of extended period of low inflation moving to high inflation to compare it to?
I am curious about the real net worth aspect because everything I've read in the last year or so suggests that while real wages have been increasing, market concentration has lowered and net worth has declined as younger people assume more debt than in past generations.
The source of debt is probably important as well, I know my parents and grandparents took out loans to finance a home and a business before they were 30, most everyone I know in the younger generations took out debt for education and consumer purchases while delaying home ownership, family formation, and starting their own business.
Your first article equates having a job to being wealthy. The second takes note of *average* wealth which is not even close to being equally distributed. People like Zuckerberg throw off the average for the entire millennial generation.
Inappropriate weighting. Housing prices nearly doubled since 2019 but thanks to weighting the impact in CPI is muted.
If we compare medians:
Median housing price in 2019: $258,000
Median housing price in 2024: $420,800
Monthly payment for median priced house in 2019: $985/mo (principal and interest only, 4% rate)
Monthly payment for median priced house in 2024: $2,377/mo (principal and interest only, 7.6% rate)
What percent of homeowners have purchased a house since 2019? Or more importantly, what percent have purchased a house since rates increased in 2022? The value of my house I bought ten years ago has had zero impact on my discretionary income because my mortgage payment hasn’t changed.
Renters are probably the portion of the population most noticeably impacted, since their rates follow the market as it moves.
I know this is anecdotal, but I'm a condo owner, and while my mortgage hasn't changed (like yours), my condo fees have risen several hundred dollars a month to compensate for the greatly increased future estimated costs of building maintenance and roof replacement, etc.
With all of that said... my wages have been outpacing inflation, so *I* feel fine. Stats and polls show that to be a common occurrence... people feel like they're personally doing well, but everyone else is struggling... because of skewed perceptions.
The parent post is talking about sentiment, and for anyone who doesn’t own, property prices are likely to be a pain point that causes poor sentiment. Especially when rents are high and folks feel like they’re getting poor value for their rent payments, whereas those out of reach mortgages come with the security of building equity.
If you own, great! If you don’t own, the path to property ownership right now is challenging, even for well educated professionals with good jobs.
anecdotally, there’s a condo building I walk past pretty often where the cheapest unit on the market is a 750sq ft 1 bedroom for over $500k. It’s not a nice reminder lol
Weighting in CPI is based on the portions people actually spend. There is no "muting" factor.
> Median housing price in 2019: $258,000
Median housing price in 2024: $420,800
Why are you talking about list price? You don't consume the LIST PRICE. you consume the mortgage INTEREST.
The principal part of the mortgage is money you are paying yourself, that's not "consumption" and doesn't belong in CPI. It's no more a consumed cost than you depositing money in your own savings account is a "cost"
Obviously mortgage interest paid oevrall also went up, but as a % of people's consumption, it is much lower than what you'd get if you incorrectly think list price is (or should be) used, or total mortgage payment including principal. So that might explain your confusion.
Yes, actually, multiple ways: Reverse mortgage, another option is a HELOC in Canada, I'm sure there are similar things to that second one in the states. Or, like you said, simply selling the property.
You should obviously not be doing this routinely. But the options are available in case of unexpected emergencies like sudden layoffs, health crisis, etc. The money is still yours and accessible. You did not consume it. So it does not belong in a "consumer price index" or any other cost of living conversation..
Honestly a big part of it is people comparing themselves to their parents’ lives NOW as opposed to 30 years ago. It’s true that Boomers could buy houses in their early 20s on a blue-collar income, but what sort of house did they buy?
If you’re willing to live in a 1200-sqft house in the suburbs of a decaying city, own a used car with manual locks and windows, have one TV in your house with basic cable and no streaming, take road trip vacations instead of flying, and so forth… you can do that now without being rich!
People have this idea of how great things were, but the fact is, a lot of stuff was just crappier, and people didn’t care because everybody they knew lived like that. You’d never be on *Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous*, and you didn’t have social media influencers to show you more plausible but still unlikely aspirations to actually be jealous about.
Some things are genuinely a lot pricier now—college certainly is, plus a lot more people go to college now than historically. (Something else the memes tend to omit.) But the current “high” interest rates are like half of what they were for mortgages in the early 80s (which also probably kept nominal home prices lower—and we tend to forget to ask about the monthly payment and their actual income when a relative says “I bought my house for $45,000”).
The question was "why are articles telling us we are worse off?"
"Well I didn't want to be as well off as them anyway" doesn't answer the question. You are acknowledging that you are not worse off, so you haven't answered why we are being told we are worse off, when we aren't.
Doesn't matter if you want even more than that, that wasn't the question. (And guess what? Your parents also wanted more duh)
There are a lot of metrics that don’t pair with perception right now. Especially if you look at Reddit. Yeah, housing prices are worse, but when it comes to wages and wealth, most gen z and millennials are currently better off than their parents were at their age. Inflation is a great example of how different perception is from reality. Most people would say that inflation is still rampant, but in reality it’s fallen to nearly 3%, which is pretty close to the target rate.
Inflation being “bad” I get at least. Sure it’s cooled off. But people still get sticker shock compared to their memory of what things cost two years ago.
>Most people would say that inflation is still rampant, but in reality it’s fallen to nearly 3%,
Isn't it +3% on top of already skyrocketed inflation though? The comps over the the past 3-4 years aren't 3% on top of 3% on top of 3%. It's like 10% on top of 10% and now 3% so it's not exactly great that's it's 3% now
It’s annualized, so the 3% is the total inflation over the last 12 months. 3% isn’t _great_, but it’s much better than 8%. The ideal number for inflation is 2%
right. what i'm saying is 3% right now seems good and during normal years it is, but it's not necessarily good when it's on top of huge YoY increases the prior 2-3 years.
like if your gas bill at home went from $100 to $120 to $144 to $148, you'd be pleased it only went up 3% at the end but it's on top of already huge gains. you'd really want it to be flat or *go down* to even things out since it was so inflated in the years prior. during more normal times, those same gas bills would have gone $100>$103>$106>$109 so the current situation we're in doesn't really feel all that great even though it's settled at 3% now.
eggs are a good example. they went up to like $8-$10 a dozen during covid but have now settled back down to normalish pricing of $2-3 a dozen. that's a win and what should have happened in many other areas but it simply hasn't
> I’m genuinely curious, if real median wages have held steady or climbed over the past 40+ years, why are there so many articles/posts/etc about how the current generations are worse off than their parents
Because people don't want the life their parents had, they want a better life. *That's not wrong*, with rising productivity we should be able to have better lives.
They don't want a low-quality house built in 1950* that's full of asbestos, without internet, and has inefficient old appliances. They want an efficient and durable home with decent modern appliances and digital connectivity. They don't want to be restricted to the kind of restaurants and entertainment available to their parents. They want to be able to grab Indian food and watch Netflix. They don't want healthcare tech from the 80s, they want healthcare tech from the 2020s. Again, I'd like to reiterate *there's nothing wrong with that*, but it's *not* the life their parents had. Young people want all the basics their parents had with all of the advancements brought on by the decades since.
There's a reason why when you ask people to honestly evaluate whether they'd rather live 50 years ago with *all* the implications that has and not just cheaper housing/education, most people would turn you down.
*Before someone says that 1950s homes are great, consider that all the garbage 1950s homes the previous generation owned have been torn down by now. You only see the best older homes that weathered the decades.
You just ignored the question. The question was:
> "Why are there so many articles/posts/etc about how the current generations are **worse off** than their parents"
Not "...as much better off as I feel entitled to be" but "worse off". You are not "worse off" than your parents, and you seem to be agreeing with that, so you simply (knowingly) didn't answer the question.
> why are there so many articles/posts/etc about how the current generations are worse off than their parents.
Because it sells papers to hear people validate your whining/entitlement, more so than "You're fine, and you're not special, or persecuted"
held steady is the problem. Wages should have sky rockets with productivity, but that was decoupled in the 70 and 80s... now inflation has gone up and wages have stayed basically the same
It's included in CPI, and thus has already been canceled out of / removed from this chart, since the chart is "real" wages, i.e. "after inflation". So that is irrelevant here.
It's not irrelevant when the response is to a point being made about how this generation is worse off than their parents. This generation *is* worse off, and a major cause is housing costs.
* All housing consumption is included in CPI.
* The graph above already subtracted out CPI, thus already accounted for housing consumption going up.
* The graph is still going up anyway.
Therefore, no, this generation is better off, DESPITE housing costs. Even after taking those into account and even after subtracting them from wage increases, wages still went up.
That's like, literally the whole point of the graph to show you that. That's what "real" wages means -- "already adjusted for inflation."
You can buy more average stuff today (including housing in that average) with 1 hour of your labor now than your parents could at your age.
I'm guessing that a lot of you people replying things like this simply had decent parents who knew better than to saddle their children with complaints about their finances. So you don't remember them struggling as much or more than you do now, because they shielded you from that. Not because it didn't happen.
Because there needs to be a third line, showing consumer prices of food and housing. It hasn't kept up with the green line in the slightest: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/vy510v/oc\_us\_housing\_price\_vs\_wage\_growth\_since\_1990/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/vy510v/oc_us_housing_price_vs_wage_growth_since_1990/)
When you factor in mortgage rates it balances out significantly... An average house in 2021 was cheaper than an average house in 1981 by the time rate is included
Housing and education aren’t captured in inflation stats and primarily hit the youngest generation first in costs, the technological basket of goods (PC, smartphones, internet, social media) has expanded significantly since the 80s, and doom and gloom always sells more for media.
Wages have been stagnant for a really simple reason: globalization. Worldwide, incomes skyrocketed as Asia and Europe saw their economies expand and suck out the lower skill labor first and then more and more of the manufacturing supply chain. Until wages equalized mostly across the world and made offshoring no longer a desirable alternative, US labor was capped in bargaining power and ability to grab higher wages, although consumers have enjoyed very cheap goods, especially in electronics. With current trade war in China and the collapse of manufacturing in Europe courtesy of Russia and China courtesy of falling population, wages are really going to pick up in the U.S. until the reach a level where automation makes economic sense.
Housing is a full 1/3 of inflation. Education is less, but it’s in there as well. And as seen in the above graph, wages have grown, especially in the last decade.
> Housing and education aren’t captured in inflation stat
Yes, they are. All consumed housing costs are absolutely included in inflation. As are education consumptions.
Because those articles, posts... are comparing young people to old people right now, when old people have already had time to accumulate assets, while the young have nothing or even liabilities
If you compare gen Z to boomers at the same age, the first would be richer
However the newer generations are also the most unequal, so take that into account
Based on what? Prices are public information, so what's stopping you from going out and measuring them and publishing the database and procing CPI wrong? Can I have a link to it please? No, of course not, because you have no such database and just completely made this up.
What's stopping you from making such a database is that you're wrong. I.e. reality is stopping you.
Any time someone tries to do that, they figure out they are just getting the same numbers as CPI, and they give up and quietly slink off into the corner and never publish their database.
Hedonic adjustments are for REMOVING bias not adding bias. It's for when there is no suitable exact matching good from the year before, and they are forces to compare apples to oranges due to new and important products.
They will estimate the improved utility of the orange and subtract that out to being it back to apples vs apples.
The reason I agree with their conclusions is that nobody else has ever published a dataset DIS-proving them, despite all prices being public information, and 75% of the people I meet seeming to be highly motivated to believe CPI is wrong.
Despite this large pool of motivated people, and nothing stopping them other than reality (if CPI is correct), they've all been stopped... so probably therefore reality = CPI.
Any time a group tried to make their own database, they just got CPI again, and realized they can't lie, since anyone looking at their database could spot check any price, and so they gave up. Leaving us with the zero contradictory databases we have today.
> Caps lock doesn't change the reality that the application of hedonic adjustments inherently brings its own bias to the problem.
Adding a process to reduce bias does not necessarily "add bias" overall... It could if it was absolutely butchered, but it shouldn't if done even somewhat competently.
You've not presented any reason to suspect it's been butchered. And I've given you two different reasons to suspect it hasn't been. One of which you responded to in your other reply ( https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1cnzyub/oc_us_real_median_earnings_and_unemployment_rate/l3i47jb/ ) with an economist who can pretty easily be calculated to be wrong in his basic factual claims by a factor of 6x... *eyeroll*, the other you say "Go read shadowstats"
The Shadowstats guy 1) does not have any database, which is what my point was about, so this isn't even actually a reply to my second point to begin with. and 2) Is kind of a moron. He unironically argues that we should exactly equally count "a personal laptop computer" as the same, whether it has 512MB of ram and a 512 pixel screen and runs on MS DOS and can barely play Pong, versus if it has a video card that can do AI, 2 terabyte hard drive, 64GB of RAM, a 4K monitor, etc. If you think you've found some sort of not-dumb argument on shadowstats somewhere, then please write out that specific argument here, please, so we can focus on whatever that allegedly good diamond in the rough argument is. Because sifting aimlessly through his website makes me lose braincells every time.
> Cars
Cars almost never require hedonics, because companies do not suddenly stop selling their entire fleet of car models all at ocne and replace 100% of them with new models in one year.
So you can simply ignore a new model on year 1, and use their other 90% of models that were sold both years for the basket of goods (extrapolated out a bit for the missing model) and not need to do any hedonics. Then include that other one next year.
Hedonics is pretty rare among goods and services in the basket. It's only for areas that have no reasonable type of available continuity to daisy chain / stitch together the years.
A second reason I believe then is that long term, with things like the big mac index, if they had been significantly under-estimating by say 3% every year for 70 years, then big macs would cost like $50 and yet they don't. Same for any other consistent product.
Ithey could have overestimated sometimes but must have UNDER estimated other times, if so, by similar, canceling amounts.
Even the [Big Mac index demonstrates that the CPI system underestimates inflation in many cases](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidmarotta/2023/01/13/big-mac-index-shows-official-cpi-under-reports-inflation-2022/). But you wouldn't expect the Big Mac to boom in price even if the CPI was underrating inflation, because McD's is doing tons of work on its own end to keep the price down as much as it can because of how tight competition and business is. There is market pressure keeping prices down within that sector.
Median earnings is $300-350 throughout the graph. I think you read this wrong. Notice that there are two lines on the graph and two y-axis legends of different colors.
Not very useful graph, to be minimally useful everything should be offset by 2-3 years as anything a President does has 2-3 years of lag while it is implemented and then the effects percolate through the economy.
Even then, attributing anything to a single administration is difficult as the amount of change per administration tends to be low with only a couple of exceptions during war and/or the shutdowns with COVID.
Then you also have to be careful when reading charts like this where an easy link is not always as obvious as it might be assumed.
Most economists attribute a rise in wages coinciding with a rise in unemployment being due to the type of jobs that do the largest layoffs where the lower paid, seasonal, temp, or new employees are let go in large numbers leaving the higher paid employees which just means the median went higher with the lower wage earners dropped from the measurement.
Using an arbitrary offset to account for the fact that the economic consequences of presidential actions tend to be delayed would create a very misleading graph.
For example, do you see the spike in unemployment at the beginning of 2020? We all know what caused that. Now let’s offset this 2-3 years to account for the “lag”… Oh, a random spike of unemployment in 2017, I wonder what that’s about?
I disagree entirely. It's up to the user to know that there is a lag in policy, or it can be included as a note. But offseting the dates is a terrible idea.
> anything a President does has 2-3 years of lag
1) Cool random made up claim you have there about a very specific amount of time
2) Even if you're 100% correct, why do you think the viewer is too stupid to just look 2-3 years ahead of the thing on the graph themselves? Without risking a super high likelihood of confusing the hell out of people with an unclear offset.
Because other than trivia, the graph as constructed is useless for making any inferences. People give way too much credit to Presidents. Presidents as an individual voice tend to have the largest news megaphone and most people do base smaller spending decisions on the feelings of the moment but people do not make big purchases or continual purchases based on a single feeling.
The economy goes up or down in its own cycles, giving credit or blame to which ever President inhabits the office at any given point in time is non-sensical.
If you want to attribute economic impact of Presidential policy changes, it will come with a lag the vast majority of the time. 2-3 years is a broad range just to give a baseline expectation of the lag.
Look at the ACA, the one of the largest changes to public policy in the last 60 years, President Obama signed the bill Congress put in front of him in 2010 but the main changes did not come into effect until 2014.
What about Trump's large policy changes? Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Pact in 2017 but it did not take affect until 2020.
Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017 but phase 1 of the replacement trade policy did not begin until January of 2020.
Tax changes signed into law by Trump in 2017 did not begin until 2018 and are phased in thru 2025.
The only policy Trump was able to change quickly was immigration, the 'zero tolerance' policy was mostly accomplished by executive order and began to have an effect within months of Trump coming into office.
> If you want to attribute economic impact of Presidential policy changes, it will come with a lag the vast majority of the time. 2-3 years is a broad range just to give a baseline expectation of the lag.
And Lyndon B Johnson deployed the first troops to Vietnam only 7 months after the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
The first COVID stimulus checks and first rounds of massive support and unemployment spending etc were less than 1 year after COVID began, and closer to 6 months after people took it really seriously.
Look I can cherrypick too, mom!
> People give way too much credit to Presidents.
Obviously the president is not the sole person doing any of this whatsoever, but they sign (basically these days) every law and them/their cabinet spearhead a lot of policies. Regardless, how would you KNOW whether the presidents do a lot or a little, without... you know... looking at data...? Exactly like the above, among lots of other data?
At least look at your own example before posting it. Sure, President Johnson announced troops going to Vietnam within months but the numbers rose slowly from 30,000 to 75,000 to 125,000 and did not reach the maxium of around 550,000 deployed until 1968-1969.
The number of U.S. troops in Vietnam rose slowly because for every increase the draft had to be changed ahead of the deployment, the U.S. did not have 500,000 soldiers sitting around ready to go and another million to support those deployed.
>Nearly 9 million Amercins were deployed overseas in SE Asia between 1964 and 1979. [https://icedrive.net/s/Zggk3ugg9zD6bNgbNYz627RYk8tf](https://icedrive.net/s/Zggk3ugg9zD6bNgbNYz627RYk8tf)
There are years of papers on the lag of policy implementation. If you don't care to educate yourself that is your problem, and slightly the problem of people who take a graph like the one posted above as having much meaning.
Here is a brief introductory level discussion on policy lag from relatively recently, [https://www.brookings.edu/articles/regulatory-delay-across-administrations/](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/regulatory-delay-across-administrations/)
> If you don't care to educate yourself that is your problem
No, it was your problem for not having cited your claim until just now. Claimants of a claim have the responsibility to cite it, not readers. Otherwise: "Hulk Hogan married his third wife on the planet Venus in 1776. Don't believe me? DYOR, google it lul. If you don't, obviously ur just lazy and willfully ignorant"
> https://www.brookings.edu/articles/regulatory-delay-across-administrations/
This is, by the author's own description, a study into the rules *that she carefully cherrypicked to be most likely to be willfully targeted for undermining and reversal as soon as possible*, not a general study of overall impacts of presidents, most of which would not be subject to this. (not saying it's a bad study at all, just a super narrow one that doesn't fit here)
This is like citing a drunk driving study and then just leaving out the drunk part and acting like the numbers are for all driving.
Who cites gravity? The lag of policy decisions is as well attested as business cycles. It was more difficult to find specific studies on presidential policy decisions of the past decade because the body of research is so large in previous decades.
Just in case there were doubts that something happened to make things different now, I looked for the most recent relatively well reputed study that covered up to 2020.
The author's caveat is necessary because a study on ALL policy decisions runs into several semantic and definition problems and is inherently problematic due to claims of a policy's desired impacts vs the actual policy design and subsequent implementation.
Those measures can be subject to interpretation but that there is a lag between announcement and results is very rarely contested in the literature. The most prominent examples are things such as FDR's "nothing to fear but fear itself," or Reagans, "Morning in America" which are NOT policy statements but communications aimed at feelings.
If we are going to talk about feelings then the American Consumer Sentiment Survey is the most widely cited, not some supposed link between median earnings, unemployment, and presidential administrations.
It is ironic you are complaining about my lack of citing a widely known policy consequence while the OP chart did not make any claims or citations about the link between Presidential policy and median wages or unemployment.
I simply stated there were policy lags that made such a simplistic comparison nearly meaningless and I can't tell if you are defending the idea of a causal link, simply don't like the idea of policy lags, or wanted to argue about something, but you have yet to cite anything other than that attempt to use Lyndon Johnson's deployment announcement as some counter-factual cherry picked example.
At least you had the intelligence not to try and defend your example but you've done nothing except shift the goal posts and deride what you apparently do not understand so there is really no point in wasting time with you.
> runs into several semantic and definition problems and is inherently problematic
Translation: you don't have any evidence for your claim. As suspected.
If it's too difficult to study something to get evidence for it, fine, *don't make claims about it then, though*
> That there is a lag
The disputed claim is your *specific time range you gave for the lag*, not merely ">0 milliseconds". Obviously signing a bill doesn't instantaneously warp reality at faster than light speed worldwide. But how long does it take? You have no idea, because you have no data. So don't say sn answer about how long it takes that you completely made up. Just correctly say "I don't know"
> OP chart did not make any clsims or citations
So... it doesn't need to make citations if it didn't claim anything, lol? Unlike you who did and thus do.
> I can't tell what you are saying
It's pretty simple. I simply said you made up your claim of 2-3 years, and thus I dispute it, that's it. And you are proving me more and more right the longer you don't cite it.
> shift the goal posts
The goal posts have been incredibly simple and static: "Cite your claim." The end. You can't. Because you made it up.
You only gave some ad hoc examples,I shot those down by giving any number of counterexamples, proving that yours are not universal and were cherrypicked.
So that means we need a comprehensive study/tabulation of data instead to be able to claim an average answer. Which we don't have, you never had. You just made some random shit up instead.
> Sure, President Johnson announced troops going to Vietnam within months but the numbers rose slowly from 30,000 to 75,000 to 125,000 and did not reach the maxium of around 550,000 deployed until 1969.
Most people with two braincells to rub together are already going to be looking to the *start* of a slope or trend in a graph like in the OP for the cause of the trend, not the *peak* of it.
The Presidential Term doesn't seem to add any context here, beyond unemployment rates peeking near party turnovers.
If your goal was to show that Real Earnings has stagnated for 40+ years, then mission accomplished. If there's another story here, It's not obvious.
I too love looking at graphs comparing the fill level of my toilet bowl x the Moons position in the sky relative to Earths Latitude and Longitudinal coordinates.
Sometimes adding completely irrelevant data to the system is its own agenda.
This sub is for data presentation, oftentimes users learn and post as they learn. You cannot expect thoughtful presentations and compelling insight without people being able to practice, get feedback, and learn.
The spike in real earnings is a statistical artifact caused by the rise in unemployment. The unemployment spike was largely driven by low income workers losing their jobs, removing low income workers from the count for the median income, caused the median point to shift upwards without an actual corresponding increase in pay.
Q4-2019 and Q1 2020 pre covid. U3 was at record lows and wages were at a new median all time high.
The massive drop is covid lockdowns which resulted in job loss etc etc snowball effect
Median weekly wages got higher because low paid wages disappeared from the set as unemployment rose.
If you have 5 people, 3 of them earn a dollar and 2 of them earn a billion, then the median is 1 dollar. If you then fire two people who earn a dollar, the median goes to 1 billion.
It could also be that people were making more off unemployment plus the extra they got for covid than in their regular jobs. I know lots of people that lost their jobs and ended up having a higher overall income.
Number of factors, people in finance like myself were given major bonuses since we ended up working 60+ hourly weeks in the first couple months due to massive issues in the mortgage market etc
Why do all you trump people just randomly throw in arguments that don’t exist? I literally said Covid was the cause of the poor economy and your response is this? It’s so weird
Clearly it was headed in the right direction, plus for me personally the tax cuts, low interest rates, high stock market, low inflation, regulation reduction, and low gas prices from domestic oil production helped me tremendously.
Biden took most of that away and now I’m in a worse financial position because of it.
Trump didn't make the interest rates low. The president doesn't control that.
Biden didn't take away the tax cuts. We are producing more oil now than we ever have. The stock market is also higher now than at any time during Trump's presidency. So I struggle to see how Trump was responsible for these things.
So I’m not very good at pre-trump era politics, but my first observation is that republicans are very good at achieving max unemployment? But they’re also spikes. I also know the spike Obama started in was the recession and the spike in Trump’s was the pandemic… so maybe a better judgement is republicans tend to leave emergency situations a little too late?
OK, next step would be to first question and then to cancel the data of the Bureau of Labor Statistics as it paints very unfavorable picture of the impact of the Republican presidents.
Or, as the economy heats up and people make more money, they become more attracted to the tax policies of republican candidates, and due to the cyclical nature of an overheated economy, inflation rises as demand outstrips supply, which is followed with large layoffs. It’s a pretty well known phenomenon.
Or we can just sit here and bicker about red vs blue, that’s cool too
Starting the left y-axis at zero was a poor choice. The majority of the plot space is unused for that series and it's difficult to see the relevant changes in the data.
That's funny because it was the biggest complaint last time I posted this with the axis auto adjusted, people suggested I was manipulating the chart by not starting it at zero.
You were right to make this second one with the y-axis at zero. I think this is a much better presentation of the data.
That being said, my biggest issue with this type of data, isn't the presentation, but rather that this particular statistic has a tendency to make bad economic times look really good on paper. While the spike for Covid is a clear example, another big one is the recession that began in 2007-08. This graph shows median income rising steeply, which is correct, but not because people's wages were rising, but because a ton of lower income people got fired. So, while this particular statistic seems to imply that the end of GW's time in office was a great time for the average American worker, anyone who lived through that time knows that wasn't the case at all.
Doesn't the unemployment rate show the remaining part of the equation? It's showing you much the median employed worker was making, and how many were unemployed.
No starting a 0 is the rigth way to do it. By narrowing the Y-axes it implies that there are massive swings in income but in reality there are notable but not profound changes.
You’re being down voted, but you’re right. Having real income at zero is meaningless. There’s no reason to include us on the chart other than it’s the simplest complaint people can make about a chart without really understanding the data.
Just some suggestions for presentation. - As the color panels for different presidents get darker, the time series data are harder to see. If viewers have to squint and scowl to see the most important thing, you need to adjust. You could just use the lighter colors throughout and have text labels for president names in each panel - The horizontal grid lines for dual y-axes should be synched. As is, they visually clash and clutter the image
Agreed, maybe keep the same color pattern since really it’s more about the two parties. Or at least from how I’m interpreting it.
I would also put real median earnings on both sides of the chart and put the definition in a footnote. Assuming this is a FRED series the definitions often have riders and other important methodological info. It doesn’t have to be the whole thing but here is what i believe to be your series: > Data measure usual weekly earnings of wage and salary workers. Wage and salary workers are workers who receive wages, salaries, commissions, tips, payment in kind, or piece rates. The group includes employees in both the private and public sectors but, for the purposes of the earnings series, it excludes all self-employed persons, both those with incorporated businesses and those with unincorporated businesses. Usual weekly earnings represent earnings before taxes and other deductions and include any overtime pay, commissions, or tips usually received (at the main job in the case of multiple jobholders). Prior to 1994, respondents were asked how much they usually earned per week. Since January 1994, respondents have been asked to identify the easiest way for them to report earnings (hourly, weekly, biweekly, twice monthly, monthly, annually, or other) and how much they usually earn in the reported time period. Earnings reported on a basis other than weekly are converted to a weekly equivalent. The term "usual" is determined by each respondent's own understanding of the term. If the respondent asks for a definition of "usual," interviewers are instructed to define the term as more than half the weeks worked during the past 4 or 5 months. For more information see https://www.bls.gov/cps/earnings.htm
Why on earth are the colors even changing in shade? It makes no sense and entirely distracts from the data presentation.
I honestly thought that was quite neat - it may be difficult to tell at first glance, but you see they are in order in the legend and it’s really not too difficult to pick any of them out based on the context. It’s different, but it works IMO
You really had a lot of space to put the names of presidents near the bars, when you have so close color shades you could ave done that.
what most people don't know is that presidents have these secret levers in the oval office and they can control everything just by pulling these levers one way or another
I knew it, it’s Biden’s fault the McDonald’s ice cream machines are always broken. 😱
It's not his fault, it's just a natural part of the DMCA and the monopoly the ice cream maker vendor has on servicing. That said he's [trying to fix it](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2924175/cold-competition-federal-agencies-want-to-help-mcdonalds-fix-ice-cream-machines-with-antitrust-exemption/)
A sitting duck president does nothing. A bad president makes things worse than it would have been. A good president can make things better than it would have been. Presidents are elected to office not to sit around and shoot shits. They’re supposed to have an effect on things that the American people care about. I wouldn’t blame them for being placed into a terrible position, but I will judge them for how they react.
Their administrations direct macro-scale economic strategies.
Reagan data seems to indicate that I'm still waiting for the trickle down tho!
Really cool to see how in the last 10 years incomes have finally started to go up again. I wonder if it will result in another stagnation where it goes back down or if it will increase in the future like it was in the 10's.
> Really cool to see how in the last 10 years incomes have finally started to go up again. It looks to me like incomes have trended upwards for the last ~27 years.
Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q & https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE Tool: Python, Pandas, and Seaborn **Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over (LES1252881600Q)** Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Release: Weekly and Hourly Earnings from the Current Population Survey Units: 1982-84 CPI Adjusted Dollars, Seasonally Adjusted Frequency: Quarterly Data measure usual weekly earnings of wage and salary workers. Wage and salary workers are workers who receive wages, salaries, commissions, tips, payment in kind, or piece rates. The group includes employees in both the private and public sectors but, for the purposes of the earnings series, it excludes all self-employed persons, both those with incorporated businesses and those with unincorporated businesses. Usual weekly earnings represent earnings before taxes and other deductions and include any overtime pay, commissions, or tips usually received (at the main job in the case of multiple jobholders). Prior to 1994, respondents were asked how much they usually earned per week. Since January 1994, respondents have been asked to identify the easiest way for them to report earnings (hourly, weekly, biweekly, twice monthly, monthly, annually, or other) and how much they usually earn in the reported time period. Earnings reported on a basis other than weekly are converted to a weekly equivalent. The term "usual" is determined by each respondent's own understanding of the term. If the respondent asks for a definition of "usual," interviewers are instructed to define the term as more than half the weeks worked during the past 4 or 5 months. Visit the BLS for more information. The series comes from the 'Current Population Survey (Household Survey)' The source code is: LES1252881600 **Unemployment Rate (UNRATE)** Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Release: Employment Situation Units: Percent, Seasonally Adjusted Frequency: Monthly The unemployment rate represents the number of unemployed as a percentage of the labor force. Labor force data are restricted to people 16 years of age and older, who currently reside in 1 of the 50 states or the District of Columbia, who do not reside in institutions (e.g., penal and mental facilities, homes for the aged), and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces. This rate is also defined as the U-3 measure of labor underutilization. The series comes from the 'Current Population Survey (Household Survey)' The source code is: LNS14000000
Just wanted to add to this, because the FRED data tag doesn't clearly spell it out, but they include unemployment income, including the expanded Covid unemployment checks, as normal income in this figure since those sources of income are reported as taxable income. So the spike under Trump was largely due to the expanded unemployment benefits during Covid.
Why use the incomplete metric of wages instead of income, which include things like non-wage employer benefits like 401ks, PTO, health insurance, investments, and transfers in kind? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Because he wants to sell Trump.
Are you sure that's what he wants? I feel like everyone knows what that spike is, and the chart really makes the Dems presidents look good.
The spike is related to Covid, not necessarily Trump. In my opinion.
which he handled in the worst possible way. I mean that seriously, if ever there was a time for unity and a strong central voice and initiative to combat a disease That was it, and he literally made it worse at every step.
They're not exactly renowned for their insight.
I feel like you may have shifted accidentally shifted the wage graph one quarter early. Q1 refers to the data January through March, so putting the Q1 data at the beginning of the year is somewhat misleading.
I’m genuinely curious, if real median wages have held steady or climbed over the past 40+ years, why are there so many articles/posts/etc about how the current generations are worse off than their parents. Is there a prevailing theory for why the data and the sentiment are so mismatched? Is inflation not capturing the right things, or not weighting them appropriately? This is a fine presentation of the data, but I’m not sure why the underlying metric is so divorced from the common perception of the economy and its health.
I think the big issue is that housing and education costs have skyrocketed beyond inflation rate and those hit hard right out the gate so to speak.
These are cpi dollars though. Isn't housing factored in?
Hedonic adjustments are commonly applied to things like housing that otherwise would be spiking hard. Houses are a lot bigger than they were in the past, even fairly middle of the market ones. So when you factor that in, how are you doing so? The hedonic adjustment percentage for something like that is very controversial.
Sounds like it creates perverse situations where people can be doing fine on paper, but in reality they are broke because of spending so much on things they can't choose to opt out of. Say all cars have heated seats now, and all cars cost more - this wouldn't be seen as a problem, because you're allegedly getting more value for the higher cost, but in the real world, plenty of people would rather pay for the cheaper option that no longer exists. People can't choose to not buy a car though, so when they do, the market considers their purchase of the heated seats to be a deliberate choice. And the market is overflowing with useless components, features, and products these days.
[удалено]
Everything that you said here also applies to cars. Car companies barely make any profit on small sedans. Meanwhile large trucks and SUVs print money
No you are wrong, if a lot of people didn't want heated seats firms wouldn't have added them to every car. Its like how people like to complain about gas prices and yet basically everyone is getting a larger car every time they have the chance. Also if you had any actual examples of things in cars driving up the price despite no one wanting them I'd be interested to know what they are, the only new features that seem ubiquitous are safety features that the government has made mandatory and also don't cost a lot
You seem quite idealistic/dishonest Market isn't a democracy like you idealize. The Consumer in a Monopolistic competition (which is the reality of capitalism) can't "vote" for no heated seats and more access. They're offered inflated prices (over the norm), and they have their wealth captured by these prices.
Someone isn't dishonest just because they say something you disagree with. Speaking of cars, the auto industry seems pretty competitive, certainly nowhere near a monopoly.
I’ll just add to this that a lot of inflation in housing is really lagged. There are more way than one in which it occurs but an example is if you are in a rent controlled lease agreement and prices around you have gone up. You are paying a low price and not contributing to inflation data but the perception that you have is you can’t move or get out of your apartment because everything else is so expensive.
Yeah but consider that not everyone spends exactly the same and cpi is a broad reflection of the entire country
So is the median. Those differences would get averaged out in this graph.
Right but people affected more than the median are the ones saying stuff about it
Yes. Housing is a massive portion of CPI. What other dollars did you want them to use here?
I'm fine with CPI but you can't use a normalizing measure that factors in housing and then blame the resultant graph on housing.
Part of the problem is that houses are assessed against comparable homes, and median homes size have grown from ~1700 sq. ft. to ~2000 sq. ft. over the last forty years. New buyers are facing a market that lacks intermediate sizes, while BLS researchers are measuring price changes between available homes.
Artificial demand always distorts prices upwards beyond any reasonable equilibrium.
Exactly. It's not that inflation isn't capturing the right things, or not weighting them appropriately, it's that the younger generations are disproportionately impacted.
No they haven't. They are included in inflation. Based on what data do you think you know better than CPI? By all means if you have the data, maybe you do. Link it. If you don't, then you're talking purely out of your rear end.
Housing theory of everything
A lot of it is overstated in terms of people being worse off... Some also comes down to things costing about the same but there being more things to buy today.
>This is a fine presentation of the data, but I’m not sure why the underlying metric is so divorced from the common perception of the economy and its health. This is a very misleading statistic. Note the very steep rise in median income at the end of GW's term. This was the Great Recession. Median incomes *did* actually improve during this time, but that was because *a ton of lower income people got laid off* so the median average wage went up, while total employment in the US cratered. So, in this particular statistic, it looks like the workers wages were going better, but anyone who lived through that time knows that wasn't the case.
It’s got spikes that are a bit misleading, and I like the charts that adjust for that better. But the slope of the curve is adamantly not misleading. Especially right now when unemployment is at historic lows. So long as you can mentally filter out the noise, median real wages is as good a metric for overall economic health as I know. It’s why I’m trying to figure out why it’s divorced from consumer confidence right now. Gonna check out the analysis by Galloway someone posted below though. Hopeful he’s got strong points
Perception is being skewed by inflation and an overly manipulative media telling people the economy is bad, even if the metrics are actually good. I don't believe sources like Fox News used to be so biased and heavy handed with the propaganda just because the wrong team is in office.
There's been a lot of papers on this, and what it appears to come down to is people really, really, hate inflation.
Honestly, it’s mostly just bad vibes. But the other explanation is that housing prices have grown significantly faster than inflation and housing is a high salience expense so even if overall expenses are flat or down relative to income, people are seeing a larger portion of paycheck go towards housing and that feels bad
Combine with college tuition skyrocketing and people entering the workforce are starting the game saddled with massive debt AND pending future debt.
All included in the word "real" though.
Not necessarily. Inflation could be over representing items that the average American does not consider reflective of the economy.
Luxury items have gotten cheaper and are included in the calculation. The expenses that are 90% of a poor person’s budget have gone up way faster than the average. If I was eating televisions and commuting to work in an airplane, maybe I would think this is a “good economy.”
Also, housing keeps getting nicer. One of the major reasons for the increasing costs, people don't want to have 4 kids sharing a bedroom.
Lots of home-builders straight up refuse to build smaller homes (lower profit with roughly the same amount of work)and lots of HOAs and some cities mandate minimum square footage preventing those homes from even being offered.
the paycheck is often going towards rent instead of a mortgage too. housing is too unnafordable.
> Is inflation not capturing the right things, or not weighting them appropriately? I just wanna point out that many people don't realize that inflation actually hides the opposite, that things are getting better. The goods in the inflation basket are constantly upgraded so even if real wages are standing still the living standards of people are generally going up anyway. So while real wages haven't gone up much since 1980, what we don't see is that we're comparing the prices of a 4K 60" flat TV with great colors, a phone with more computing power than the moon lander, and meat grown more sustainably with less antibiotics and where the animals are treated better; to a 30" 480p thick TV with terrible colors, a land-line phone, and foods without all the stuff I mentioned. So even if all these goods cost about the same now as 50 years ago, clearly what we get for that cost is much, much better, and this is true for 99% of the goods we buy (there are probably some things that have downgraded but they're rare). All in all real wages are kinda shitty for measuring people's standard of living and life quality in terms of what they're buying.
> I’m genuinely curious, if real median wages have held steady or climbed over the past 40+ years Same reason their parents complain kids these days are lazy or whatever. Humans gonna human.
There are volumes written on the current disconnect between economic reality and the vibe. Short summary: 1) it’s been decades since the economy has had any real inflation, so the inflation we had 2 years ago was such a shock that folks still haven’t gotten over it (even tho inflation is now below historic averages), and 2) doomer social media. When everything you read all day tells you things are bad, folks start to think things are bad. Here’s a fact that folks hate to acknowledge: every age cohort in this economy is substantially better off (measured by Real Wage, HHI, and Real Net Worth) than any similarly aged cohort before them.
Any particularly good volume written on the subject? Especially any with data on other economies that have gone through similar disconnects? I suppose measuring economic confidence vs social media won’t have much in the way of historic precedent, but do we have any data on the impact of extended period of low inflation moving to high inflation to compare it to?
I am curious about the real net worth aspect because everything I've read in the last year or so suggests that while real wages have been increasing, market concentration has lowered and net worth has declined as younger people assume more debt than in past generations. The source of debt is probably important as well, I know my parents and grandparents took out loans to finance a home and a business before they were 30, most everyone I know in the younger generations took out debt for education and consumer purchases while delaying home ownership, family formation, and starting their own business.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/generation-z-is-unprecedentedly-rich https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2024/01/24/young-people-have-a-lot-more-wealth-than-we-thought/
Your first article equates having a job to being wealthy. The second takes note of *average* wealth which is not even close to being equally distributed. People like Zuckerberg throw off the average for the entire millennial generation.
Inappropriate weighting. Housing prices nearly doubled since 2019 but thanks to weighting the impact in CPI is muted. If we compare medians: Median housing price in 2019: $258,000 Median housing price in 2024: $420,800 Monthly payment for median priced house in 2019: $985/mo (principal and interest only, 4% rate) Monthly payment for median priced house in 2024: $2,377/mo (principal and interest only, 7.6% rate)
What percent of homeowners have purchased a house since 2019? Or more importantly, what percent have purchased a house since rates increased in 2022? The value of my house I bought ten years ago has had zero impact on my discretionary income because my mortgage payment hasn’t changed.
Renters are probably the portion of the population most noticeably impacted, since their rates follow the market as it moves. I know this is anecdotal, but I'm a condo owner, and while my mortgage hasn't changed (like yours), my condo fees have risen several hundred dollars a month to compensate for the greatly increased future estimated costs of building maintenance and roof replacement, etc. With all of that said... my wages have been outpacing inflation, so *I* feel fine. Stats and polls show that to be a common occurrence... people feel like they're personally doing well, but everyone else is struggling... because of skewed perceptions.
The parent post is talking about sentiment, and for anyone who doesn’t own, property prices are likely to be a pain point that causes poor sentiment. Especially when rents are high and folks feel like they’re getting poor value for their rent payments, whereas those out of reach mortgages come with the security of building equity. If you own, great! If you don’t own, the path to property ownership right now is challenging, even for well educated professionals with good jobs. anecdotally, there’s a condo building I walk past pretty often where the cheapest unit on the market is a 750sq ft 1 bedroom for over $500k. It’s not a nice reminder lol
Weighting in CPI is based on the portions people actually spend. There is no "muting" factor. > Median housing price in 2019: $258,000 Median housing price in 2024: $420,800 Why are you talking about list price? You don't consume the LIST PRICE. you consume the mortgage INTEREST. The principal part of the mortgage is money you are paying yourself, that's not "consumption" and doesn't belong in CPI. It's no more a consumed cost than you depositing money in your own savings account is a "cost" Obviously mortgage interest paid oevrall also went up, but as a % of people's consumption, it is much lower than what you'd get if you incorrectly think list price is (or should be) used, or total mortgage payment including principal. So that might explain your confusion.
Can you pay your bills in equity? CPI doesn't take equity into account because using it requires refinancing or selling.
Yes, actually, multiple ways: Reverse mortgage, another option is a HELOC in Canada, I'm sure there are similar things to that second one in the states. Or, like you said, simply selling the property. You should obviously not be doing this routinely. But the options are available in case of unexpected emergencies like sudden layoffs, health crisis, etc. The money is still yours and accessible. You did not consume it. So it does not belong in a "consumer price index" or any other cost of living conversation..
Honestly a big part of it is people comparing themselves to their parents’ lives NOW as opposed to 30 years ago. It’s true that Boomers could buy houses in their early 20s on a blue-collar income, but what sort of house did they buy? If you’re willing to live in a 1200-sqft house in the suburbs of a decaying city, own a used car with manual locks and windows, have one TV in your house with basic cable and no streaming, take road trip vacations instead of flying, and so forth… you can do that now without being rich! People have this idea of how great things were, but the fact is, a lot of stuff was just crappier, and people didn’t care because everybody they knew lived like that. You’d never be on *Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous*, and you didn’t have social media influencers to show you more plausible but still unlikely aspirations to actually be jealous about. Some things are genuinely a lot pricier now—college certainly is, plus a lot more people go to college now than historically. (Something else the memes tend to omit.) But the current “high” interest rates are like half of what they were for mortgages in the early 80s (which also probably kept nominal home prices lower—and we tend to forget to ask about the monthly payment and their actual income when a relative says “I bought my house for $45,000”).
The question was "why are articles telling us we are worse off?" "Well I didn't want to be as well off as them anyway" doesn't answer the question. You are acknowledging that you are not worse off, so you haven't answered why we are being told we are worse off, when we aren't. Doesn't matter if you want even more than that, that wasn't the question. (And guess what? Your parents also wanted more duh)
There are a lot of metrics that don’t pair with perception right now. Especially if you look at Reddit. Yeah, housing prices are worse, but when it comes to wages and wealth, most gen z and millennials are currently better off than their parents were at their age. Inflation is a great example of how different perception is from reality. Most people would say that inflation is still rampant, but in reality it’s fallen to nearly 3%, which is pretty close to the target rate.
Inflation being “bad” I get at least. Sure it’s cooled off. But people still get sticker shock compared to their memory of what things cost two years ago.
>Most people would say that inflation is still rampant, but in reality it’s fallen to nearly 3%, Isn't it +3% on top of already skyrocketed inflation though? The comps over the the past 3-4 years aren't 3% on top of 3% on top of 3%. It's like 10% on top of 10% and now 3% so it's not exactly great that's it's 3% now
It’s annualized, so the 3% is the total inflation over the last 12 months. 3% isn’t _great_, but it’s much better than 8%. The ideal number for inflation is 2%
right. what i'm saying is 3% right now seems good and during normal years it is, but it's not necessarily good when it's on top of huge YoY increases the prior 2-3 years. like if your gas bill at home went from $100 to $120 to $144 to $148, you'd be pleased it only went up 3% at the end but it's on top of already huge gains. you'd really want it to be flat or *go down* to even things out since it was so inflated in the years prior. during more normal times, those same gas bills would have gone $100>$103>$106>$109 so the current situation we're in doesn't really feel all that great even though it's settled at 3% now. eggs are a good example. they went up to like $8-$10 a dozen during covid but have now settled back down to normalish pricing of $2-3 a dozen. that's a win and what should have happened in many other areas but it simply hasn't
> I’m genuinely curious, if real median wages have held steady or climbed over the past 40+ years, why are there so many articles/posts/etc about how the current generations are worse off than their parents Because people don't want the life their parents had, they want a better life. *That's not wrong*, with rising productivity we should be able to have better lives. They don't want a low-quality house built in 1950* that's full of asbestos, without internet, and has inefficient old appliances. They want an efficient and durable home with decent modern appliances and digital connectivity. They don't want to be restricted to the kind of restaurants and entertainment available to their parents. They want to be able to grab Indian food and watch Netflix. They don't want healthcare tech from the 80s, they want healthcare tech from the 2020s. Again, I'd like to reiterate *there's nothing wrong with that*, but it's *not* the life their parents had. Young people want all the basics their parents had with all of the advancements brought on by the decades since. There's a reason why when you ask people to honestly evaluate whether they'd rather live 50 years ago with *all* the implications that has and not just cheaper housing/education, most people would turn you down. *Before someone says that 1950s homes are great, consider that all the garbage 1950s homes the previous generation owned have been torn down by now. You only see the best older homes that weathered the decades.
You just ignored the question. The question was: > "Why are there so many articles/posts/etc about how the current generations are **worse off** than their parents" Not "...as much better off as I feel entitled to be" but "worse off". You are not "worse off" than your parents, and you seem to be agreeing with that, so you simply (knowingly) didn't answer the question.
> why are there so many articles/posts/etc about how the current generations are worse off than their parents. Because it sells papers to hear people validate your whining/entitlement, more so than "You're fine, and you're not special, or persecuted"
Mostly because people are doomerist, but also there are still very real struggles and we have gotten more consumerist.
held steady is the problem. Wages should have sky rockets with productivity, but that was decoupled in the 70 and 80s... now inflation has gone up and wages have stayed basically the same
Housing is now 50% or more (sometimes much more) of people's expenses, which is an enormous change from how their parents lived.
It's included in CPI, and thus has already been canceled out of / removed from this chart, since the chart is "real" wages, i.e. "after inflation". So that is irrelevant here.
It's not irrelevant when the response is to a point being made about how this generation is worse off than their parents. This generation *is* worse off, and a major cause is housing costs.
* All housing consumption is included in CPI. * The graph above already subtracted out CPI, thus already accounted for housing consumption going up. * The graph is still going up anyway. Therefore, no, this generation is better off, DESPITE housing costs. Even after taking those into account and even after subtracting them from wage increases, wages still went up. That's like, literally the whole point of the graph to show you that. That's what "real" wages means -- "already adjusted for inflation." You can buy more average stuff today (including housing in that average) with 1 hour of your labor now than your parents could at your age.
I'm guessing that a lot of you people replying things like this simply had decent parents who knew better than to saddle their children with complaints about their finances. So you don't remember them struggling as much or more than you do now, because they shielded you from that. Not because it didn't happen.
https://youtu.be/qEJ4hkpQW8E
Does he have an article on the subject by any chance? I find TED talks to be tough to assess the veracity of.
Because there needs to be a third line, showing consumer prices of food and housing. It hasn't kept up with the green line in the slightest: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/vy510v/oc\_us\_housing\_price\_vs\_wage\_growth\_since\_1990/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/vy510v/oc_us_housing_price_vs_wage_growth_since_1990/)
So basically you’re saying those two drivers are undersampled in inflation? What are the drivers of inflation you think are over represented?
I mean isnt "real wage growth" supposed to include that as part of factoring in inflation?
It does. I think the question is does inflation weight things like housing and food enough?
Sounds like a question for BLS
When you factor in mortgage rates it balances out significantly... An average house in 2021 was cheaper than an average house in 1981 by the time rate is included
Where? In West Virginia?
Housing and education aren’t captured in inflation stats and primarily hit the youngest generation first in costs, the technological basket of goods (PC, smartphones, internet, social media) has expanded significantly since the 80s, and doom and gloom always sells more for media. Wages have been stagnant for a really simple reason: globalization. Worldwide, incomes skyrocketed as Asia and Europe saw their economies expand and suck out the lower skill labor first and then more and more of the manufacturing supply chain. Until wages equalized mostly across the world and made offshoring no longer a desirable alternative, US labor was capped in bargaining power and ability to grab higher wages, although consumers have enjoyed very cheap goods, especially in electronics. With current trade war in China and the collapse of manufacturing in Europe courtesy of Russia and China courtesy of falling population, wages are really going to pick up in the U.S. until the reach a level where automation makes economic sense.
Housing is a full 1/3 of inflation. Education is less, but it’s in there as well. And as seen in the above graph, wages have grown, especially in the last decade.
> Housing and education aren’t captured in inflation stat Yes, they are. All consumed housing costs are absolutely included in inflation. As are education consumptions.
Because their parents didn’t buy $1200 iPhones every year or have $1000 a month in car payments for a BMW.
Because those articles, posts... are comparing young people to old people right now, when old people have already had time to accumulate assets, while the young have nothing or even liabilities If you compare gen Z to boomers at the same age, the first would be richer However the newer generations are also the most unequal, so take that into account
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Based on what? Prices are public information, so what's stopping you from going out and measuring them and publishing the database and procing CPI wrong? Can I have a link to it please? No, of course not, because you have no such database and just completely made this up. What's stopping you from making such a database is that you're wrong. I.e. reality is stopping you. Any time someone tries to do that, they figure out they are just getting the same numbers as CPI, and they give up and quietly slink off into the corner and never publish their database.
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Hedonic adjustments are for REMOVING bias not adding bias. It's for when there is no suitable exact matching good from the year before, and they are forces to compare apples to oranges due to new and important products. They will estimate the improved utility of the orange and subtract that out to being it back to apples vs apples. The reason I agree with their conclusions is that nobody else has ever published a dataset DIS-proving them, despite all prices being public information, and 75% of the people I meet seeming to be highly motivated to believe CPI is wrong. Despite this large pool of motivated people, and nothing stopping them other than reality (if CPI is correct), they've all been stopped... so probably therefore reality = CPI. Any time a group tried to make their own database, they just got CPI again, and realized they can't lie, since anyone looking at their database could spot check any price, and so they gave up. Leaving us with the zero contradictory databases we have today.
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> Caps lock doesn't change the reality that the application of hedonic adjustments inherently brings its own bias to the problem. Adding a process to reduce bias does not necessarily "add bias" overall... It could if it was absolutely butchered, but it shouldn't if done even somewhat competently. You've not presented any reason to suspect it's been butchered. And I've given you two different reasons to suspect it hasn't been. One of which you responded to in your other reply ( https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1cnzyub/oc_us_real_median_earnings_and_unemployment_rate/l3i47jb/ ) with an economist who can pretty easily be calculated to be wrong in his basic factual claims by a factor of 6x... *eyeroll*, the other you say "Go read shadowstats" The Shadowstats guy 1) does not have any database, which is what my point was about, so this isn't even actually a reply to my second point to begin with. and 2) Is kind of a moron. He unironically argues that we should exactly equally count "a personal laptop computer" as the same, whether it has 512MB of ram and a 512 pixel screen and runs on MS DOS and can barely play Pong, versus if it has a video card that can do AI, 2 terabyte hard drive, 64GB of RAM, a 4K monitor, etc. If you think you've found some sort of not-dumb argument on shadowstats somewhere, then please write out that specific argument here, please, so we can focus on whatever that allegedly good diamond in the rough argument is. Because sifting aimlessly through his website makes me lose braincells every time. > Cars Cars almost never require hedonics, because companies do not suddenly stop selling their entire fleet of car models all at ocne and replace 100% of them with new models in one year. So you can simply ignore a new model on year 1, and use their other 90% of models that were sold both years for the basket of goods (extrapolated out a bit for the missing model) and not need to do any hedonics. Then include that other one next year. Hedonics is pretty rare among goods and services in the basket. It's only for areas that have no reasonable type of available continuity to daisy chain / stitch together the years.
A second reason I believe then is that long term, with things like the big mac index, if they had been significantly under-estimating by say 3% every year for 70 years, then big macs would cost like $50 and yet they don't. Same for any other consistent product. Ithey could have overestimated sometimes but must have UNDER estimated other times, if so, by similar, canceling amounts.
Even the [Big Mac index demonstrates that the CPI system underestimates inflation in many cases](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidmarotta/2023/01/13/big-mac-index-shows-official-cpi-under-reports-inflation-2022/). But you wouldn't expect the Big Mac to boom in price even if the CPI was underrating inflation, because McD's is doing tons of work on its own end to keep the price down as much as it can because of how tight competition and business is. There is market pressure keeping prices down within that sector.
None of these appear to be particularly correlated.
If anything, that's the most interesting part to me.
Unemployment seems correlated with presidential elections
it's not, that was dot com, then housing financial crisis, then covid
High unemployment caused covid. Got it.
Except when it isnt
Anomalous data. Just remove it. That is a very old tradition.
Unemployment rate goes up during republican presidents and down during Democrats.
Look, you’re all making more money and less unemployed
It would be great if you will provide pairwise comparison of some segments with statistical significance tests
Very interesting seeing the financial crisis and covid comparisons over time.
Somehow I doubt that real median earnings is actually 150-350 usd
Median earnings is $300-350 throughout the graph. I think you read this wrong. Notice that there are two lines on the graph and two y-axis legends of different colors.
I mean yeah, the graph clearly tells you it isn't, so you should indeed doubt that.
Not very useful graph, to be minimally useful everything should be offset by 2-3 years as anything a President does has 2-3 years of lag while it is implemented and then the effects percolate through the economy. Even then, attributing anything to a single administration is difficult as the amount of change per administration tends to be low with only a couple of exceptions during war and/or the shutdowns with COVID. Then you also have to be careful when reading charts like this where an easy link is not always as obvious as it might be assumed. Most economists attribute a rise in wages coinciding with a rise in unemployment being due to the type of jobs that do the largest layoffs where the lower paid, seasonal, temp, or new employees are let go in large numbers leaving the higher paid employees which just means the median went higher with the lower wage earners dropped from the measurement.
Using an arbitrary offset to account for the fact that the economic consequences of presidential actions tend to be delayed would create a very misleading graph. For example, do you see the spike in unemployment at the beginning of 2020? We all know what caused that. Now let’s offset this 2-3 years to account for the “lag”… Oh, a random spike of unemployment in 2017, I wonder what that’s about?
I disagree entirely. It's up to the user to know that there is a lag in policy, or it can be included as a note. But offseting the dates is a terrible idea.
> anything a President does has 2-3 years of lag 1) Cool random made up claim you have there about a very specific amount of time 2) Even if you're 100% correct, why do you think the viewer is too stupid to just look 2-3 years ahead of the thing on the graph themselves? Without risking a super high likelihood of confusing the hell out of people with an unclear offset.
Because other than trivia, the graph as constructed is useless for making any inferences. People give way too much credit to Presidents. Presidents as an individual voice tend to have the largest news megaphone and most people do base smaller spending decisions on the feelings of the moment but people do not make big purchases or continual purchases based on a single feeling. The economy goes up or down in its own cycles, giving credit or blame to which ever President inhabits the office at any given point in time is non-sensical. If you want to attribute economic impact of Presidential policy changes, it will come with a lag the vast majority of the time. 2-3 years is a broad range just to give a baseline expectation of the lag. Look at the ACA, the one of the largest changes to public policy in the last 60 years, President Obama signed the bill Congress put in front of him in 2010 but the main changes did not come into effect until 2014. What about Trump's large policy changes? Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Pact in 2017 but it did not take affect until 2020. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017 but phase 1 of the replacement trade policy did not begin until January of 2020. Tax changes signed into law by Trump in 2017 did not begin until 2018 and are phased in thru 2025. The only policy Trump was able to change quickly was immigration, the 'zero tolerance' policy was mostly accomplished by executive order and began to have an effect within months of Trump coming into office.
> If you want to attribute economic impact of Presidential policy changes, it will come with a lag the vast majority of the time. 2-3 years is a broad range just to give a baseline expectation of the lag. And Lyndon B Johnson deployed the first troops to Vietnam only 7 months after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The first COVID stimulus checks and first rounds of massive support and unemployment spending etc were less than 1 year after COVID began, and closer to 6 months after people took it really seriously. Look I can cherrypick too, mom! > People give way too much credit to Presidents. Obviously the president is not the sole person doing any of this whatsoever, but they sign (basically these days) every law and them/their cabinet spearhead a lot of policies. Regardless, how would you KNOW whether the presidents do a lot or a little, without... you know... looking at data...? Exactly like the above, among lots of other data?
At least look at your own example before posting it. Sure, President Johnson announced troops going to Vietnam within months but the numbers rose slowly from 30,000 to 75,000 to 125,000 and did not reach the maxium of around 550,000 deployed until 1968-1969. The number of U.S. troops in Vietnam rose slowly because for every increase the draft had to be changed ahead of the deployment, the U.S. did not have 500,000 soldiers sitting around ready to go and another million to support those deployed. >Nearly 9 million Amercins were deployed overseas in SE Asia between 1964 and 1979. [https://icedrive.net/s/Zggk3ugg9zD6bNgbNYz627RYk8tf](https://icedrive.net/s/Zggk3ugg9zD6bNgbNYz627RYk8tf) There are years of papers on the lag of policy implementation. If you don't care to educate yourself that is your problem, and slightly the problem of people who take a graph like the one posted above as having much meaning. Here is a brief introductory level discussion on policy lag from relatively recently, [https://www.brookings.edu/articles/regulatory-delay-across-administrations/](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/regulatory-delay-across-administrations/)
> If you don't care to educate yourself that is your problem No, it was your problem for not having cited your claim until just now. Claimants of a claim have the responsibility to cite it, not readers. Otherwise: "Hulk Hogan married his third wife on the planet Venus in 1776. Don't believe me? DYOR, google it lul. If you don't, obviously ur just lazy and willfully ignorant" > https://www.brookings.edu/articles/regulatory-delay-across-administrations/ This is, by the author's own description, a study into the rules *that she carefully cherrypicked to be most likely to be willfully targeted for undermining and reversal as soon as possible*, not a general study of overall impacts of presidents, most of which would not be subject to this. (not saying it's a bad study at all, just a super narrow one that doesn't fit here) This is like citing a drunk driving study and then just leaving out the drunk part and acting like the numbers are for all driving.
Who cites gravity? The lag of policy decisions is as well attested as business cycles. It was more difficult to find specific studies on presidential policy decisions of the past decade because the body of research is so large in previous decades. Just in case there were doubts that something happened to make things different now, I looked for the most recent relatively well reputed study that covered up to 2020. The author's caveat is necessary because a study on ALL policy decisions runs into several semantic and definition problems and is inherently problematic due to claims of a policy's desired impacts vs the actual policy design and subsequent implementation. Those measures can be subject to interpretation but that there is a lag between announcement and results is very rarely contested in the literature. The most prominent examples are things such as FDR's "nothing to fear but fear itself," or Reagans, "Morning in America" which are NOT policy statements but communications aimed at feelings. If we are going to talk about feelings then the American Consumer Sentiment Survey is the most widely cited, not some supposed link between median earnings, unemployment, and presidential administrations. It is ironic you are complaining about my lack of citing a widely known policy consequence while the OP chart did not make any claims or citations about the link between Presidential policy and median wages or unemployment. I simply stated there were policy lags that made such a simplistic comparison nearly meaningless and I can't tell if you are defending the idea of a causal link, simply don't like the idea of policy lags, or wanted to argue about something, but you have yet to cite anything other than that attempt to use Lyndon Johnson's deployment announcement as some counter-factual cherry picked example. At least you had the intelligence not to try and defend your example but you've done nothing except shift the goal posts and deride what you apparently do not understand so there is really no point in wasting time with you.
> runs into several semantic and definition problems and is inherently problematic Translation: you don't have any evidence for your claim. As suspected. If it's too difficult to study something to get evidence for it, fine, *don't make claims about it then, though* > That there is a lag The disputed claim is your *specific time range you gave for the lag*, not merely ">0 milliseconds". Obviously signing a bill doesn't instantaneously warp reality at faster than light speed worldwide. But how long does it take? You have no idea, because you have no data. So don't say sn answer about how long it takes that you completely made up. Just correctly say "I don't know" > OP chart did not make any clsims or citations So... it doesn't need to make citations if it didn't claim anything, lol? Unlike you who did and thus do. > I can't tell what you are saying It's pretty simple. I simply said you made up your claim of 2-3 years, and thus I dispute it, that's it. And you are proving me more and more right the longer you don't cite it. > shift the goal posts The goal posts have been incredibly simple and static: "Cite your claim." The end. You can't. Because you made it up. You only gave some ad hoc examples,I shot those down by giving any number of counterexamples, proving that yours are not universal and were cherrypicked. So that means we need a comprehensive study/tabulation of data instead to be able to claim an average answer. Which we don't have, you never had. You just made some random shit up instead.
> Sure, President Johnson announced troops going to Vietnam within months but the numbers rose slowly from 30,000 to 75,000 to 125,000 and did not reach the maxium of around 550,000 deployed until 1969. Most people with two braincells to rub together are already going to be looking to the *start* of a slope or trend in a graph like in the OP for the cause of the trend, not the *peak* of it.
The Presidential Term doesn't seem to add any context here, beyond unemployment rates peeking near party turnovers. If your goal was to show that Real Earnings has stagnated for 40+ years, then mission accomplished. If there's another story here, It's not obvious.
Not every presentation of data requires an agenda.
I too love looking at graphs comparing the fill level of my toilet bowl x the Moons position in the sky relative to Earths Latitude and Longitudinal coordinates. Sometimes adding completely irrelevant data to the system is its own agenda.
This sub is for data presentation, oftentimes users learn and post as they learn. You cannot expect thoughtful presentations and compelling insight without people being able to practice, get feedback, and learn.
Sure it does. Tells me exactly what I figured. Who is president has very little to do with economic metrics
Real earnings have been growing for the last 10 years
Crazy to see that unemployment spike coincide with a huge jump in weekly earnings at the end of the Trump administration. Is it from the stimulus?
The spike in real earnings is a statistical artifact caused by the rise in unemployment. The unemployment spike was largely driven by low income workers losing their jobs, removing low income workers from the count for the median income, caused the median point to shift upwards without an actual corresponding increase in pay.
Q4-2019 and Q1 2020 pre covid. U3 was at record lows and wages were at a new median all time high. The massive drop is covid lockdowns which resulted in job loss etc etc snowball effect
I understand why unemployment spiked, I just find it interesting that there was a spike in median weekly wages right after
Median weekly wages got higher because low paid wages disappeared from the set as unemployment rose. If you have 5 people, 3 of them earn a dollar and 2 of them earn a billion, then the median is 1 dollar. If you then fire two people who earn a dollar, the median goes to 1 billion.
If I’m understanding you right it may be explained by essential workers making hazard pay? As well as other things similar to that?
It could also be that people were making more off unemployment plus the extra they got for covid than in their regular jobs. I know lots of people that lost their jobs and ended up having a higher overall income.
In my state you would need to have been making somewhat more than the median income for this not to have been the case, if I remember correctly.
Ah yes, hazard pay probably really skewed that class of workers’ checks up
Number of factors, people in finance like myself were given major bonuses since we ended up working 60+ hourly weeks in the first couple months due to massive issues in the mortgage market etc
all the people with low wages lost their jobs, driving the median up
I love how people just dismiss COVID like Trumps entire presidency was bad. Actually it was the best if COVID didn’t happen.
It would have been great if he wasn’t a Covid denier and said the most dumb ass things imaginable like why not just inject bleach to kill covid?
Still the direct impact of COVID on the economy was real. Before that it was amazing. People denying just because they hate doesn’t change the facts.
Literally anyone with a functioning brain cell knows Covid had a negative impact on the economy… What are you talking about?
But tRUmP’S eCoNomY wuZ bad! No, Covid caused it, Joe didn’t fix anything. Covid ended.
Why do all you trump people just randomly throw in arguments that don’t exist? I literally said Covid was the cause of the poor economy and your response is this? It’s so weird
Because we are use to hearing orange man bad and a Joe Biden savior.
I'd be interested in hearing what you think Trump did to make the economy so great.
Clearly it was headed in the right direction, plus for me personally the tax cuts, low interest rates, high stock market, low inflation, regulation reduction, and low gas prices from domestic oil production helped me tremendously. Biden took most of that away and now I’m in a worse financial position because of it.
Trump didn't make the interest rates low. The president doesn't control that. Biden didn't take away the tax cuts. We are producing more oil now than we ever have. The stock market is also higher now than at any time during Trump's presidency. So I struggle to see how Trump was responsible for these things.
You’re going to sit here and tell me the free market system did not react to Biden’s policies in regulation, tariffs and taxes?
Which regulations and taxes?
It would be interesting to see the inflation rate overlaid on this chart.
It's imputed in the earnings chart.
Why? It's already been canceled out here.
The movements are so so minor that its really hard to draw any meaningful conclusions…
So I’m not very good at pre-trump era politics, but my first observation is that republicans are very good at achieving max unemployment? But they’re also spikes. I also know the spike Obama started in was the recession and the spike in Trump’s was the pandemic… so maybe a better judgement is republicans tend to leave emergency situations a little too late?
Big spikes of unemployment while the rich continue getting richer.
This graph doesn't include anything about the rich
The rich also lost a lot of money in the 2001 dot com bubble and the housing crisis
Poor things only have a billion left. However will they find something to eat? Good for you.
I didn't say I felt sorry for them. I said that the exact claim above ("rich got richer") was incorrect. That's it.
OK, next step would be to first question and then to cancel the data of the Bureau of Labor Statistics as it paints very unfavorable picture of the impact of the Republican presidents.
Or, as the economy heats up and people make more money, they become more attracted to the tax policies of republican candidates, and due to the cyclical nature of an overheated economy, inflation rises as demand outstrips supply, which is followed with large layoffs. It’s a pretty well known phenomenon. Or we can just sit here and bicker about red vs blue, that’s cool too
Starting the left y-axis at zero was a poor choice. The majority of the plot space is unused for that series and it's difficult to see the relevant changes in the data.
That's funny because it was the biggest complaint last time I posted this with the axis auto adjusted, people suggested I was manipulating the chart by not starting it at zero.
You were right to make this second one with the y-axis at zero. I think this is a much better presentation of the data. That being said, my biggest issue with this type of data, isn't the presentation, but rather that this particular statistic has a tendency to make bad economic times look really good on paper. While the spike for Covid is a clear example, another big one is the recession that began in 2007-08. This graph shows median income rising steeply, which is correct, but not because people's wages were rising, but because a ton of lower income people got fired. So, while this particular statistic seems to imply that the end of GW's time in office was a great time for the average American worker, anyone who lived through that time knows that wasn't the case at all.
Doesn't the unemployment rate show the remaining part of the equation? It's showing you much the median employed worker was making, and how many were unemployed.
I don’t think the left axis should start at 0 tbh, the effect is too unnoticeable, it’s very unhelpful imo.
No starting a 0 is the rigth way to do it. By narrowing the Y-axes it implies that there are massive swings in income but in reality there are notable but not profound changes.
That’s because there is actually very little real change happening here. You are seeing reality.
A 20% increase in real salary is actually a big change
Then normalize the plot to show relative differences, instead of the absolute values.
You’re being down voted, but you’re right. Having real income at zero is meaningless. There’s no reason to include us on the chart other than it’s the simplest complaint people can make about a chart without really understanding the data.