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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

1% real income growth per year is still fairly substantial IMO. Over a 41 year career, your purchasing power goes up by half, yet that's treated as "stagnating" which implies something far worse than 1% per year.

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I think the nuance here is that it's stagnating relative to overall income growth. I.e. 1% isn't terrible if everyone is getting roughly 1%. But that's not the situation - the economy is growing more rapidly than that, but only a tiny percentage of people are seeing big gains for their own incomes.

There's no reason to me to think that the vast majority of people should see substantial real income gains. Money is fundamentally a claim check on someone else's labor and/or resources. If you have more money (in real terms), you have a greater claim on others' resources. That can't stay true for an entire population over a long period of time. It's temporarily true for the US, because we're able to take advantage of labor from other, cheaper places in the world, in the process, making that other place better off as well.

Those of us in the broad swath from 10th to 99th percentile don't really compete for those things that are purchased by the top 0.01%, so I basically don't care how fast their incomes grow, nor how fast the prices of caviar, ski lodges in Jackson Hole, etc. grow.

I care about food, housing, transportation, and education. In competing for those resources, there's fairly broad equity in the charts in the vox article (realizing that people don't stay static on that chart).

It's nothing, if your expenses grow at higher rate.

Not if inflation is 3-4% per year.

Real income growth is, by definition, after accounting for inflation.

The opposing term is "nominal income growth" which does not account for inflation.

"Real income growth" is the growth in income post inflation.

He said 'real' income growth, which I take to mean adjusted for inflation and maybe also various cost of living increases/decreases.

And even less so if "inflation" has been redefined specifically to be lower, in order to reduce the amount of real money that needs to go into social security.

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