July 2018 Median Household Income in the U.S.

Feel free to post a better presentation of the data.

[1] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2018/demo/income-poverty/...

Why would they be? They certainly didn't say they are.

> What you really means is that using an honest scale makes the trend look less dramatic.

I think "honest" is a loaded term here. It's a well known fact that income inequality has been growing in the US for decades now, and the trend is dramatic and undeniable. Are there ways to minimize it visually in a graph? Sure, you could blow out the axes, or you could do yearly deltas which wouldn't have the line moving past a few percent ever. Both of these suggestions would flatten this phenomena, and coincidentally both have been suggested here. But the phenomena itself is not flat, and therefore it is the flat representation that, by definition, would be misleading.

Not necessarily - I just like to muse about big-picture problems with society from time to time. Contrasting median and mean income (a flawed measure for various reasons) was just the first idea I had when I was trying to sanity-check the common-sense idea that because it's easier to get money if you already have money, social polarization is likely to grow.

As far as the US is concerned, campaign finance reform often gets mentioned as the most immediate step to improve upon the current situation.

As to the big-picture problems, frankly, I'm not sure humanity as a species is enlightened enough to overcome self-interest and inertia to ever fix the systemic problems present in the current way we organize society. Hope for benevolent robot overlords, I guess ;)

How do you measure the value of that health insureance? You can of course post the sticker price, but the healthcare that the dollar buys you is difficult to measure. Life expectancy tells that the rest of the OECD is there with the US but pays 25 % of the costs.

Also keep in mind that a lot of that intense technological development has resulted in falling costs for a wide variety of goods over time

It's like a certain re-work of the Bible. Their version of Revelation 6 reads : "A pound of bread will now be 90 Euros. But the price of a Porsche will remain unchanged." And we all thought that the Apocalypse of St John was literature, not an accurate prediction of the future! Yes, technological progress can bring down the price of an i-Pad but won't do anything about the rent.

I don't really think it is a question that needs to be answered, but a problem that needs to be resolved. It's pretty well documented that income inequality in the US is at an all time high and will only get worse with more automation and recent changes to the tax codes.

> This sounds like government regulation?

No - the reason students can take outrageous loans is that the government enforces that they always get paid back. There is no bankruptcy discharge for student debt. Consequently, universities increase prices as the government allows students to take more debt. No bank in the world would provide a $200k loan for a poetry degree if it could be discharged in bankruptcy.

> >Housing - build more and higher density.

> How do you account for the fact that not really anybody is making housing for the poor or low income, affordable housing because it's not profitable? There's plenty of demand, but extremely low supply. Would that be accomplished with government regulation and subsidies?

The amount of red tape and bureaucracy required for building new housing, and other requirements like minimum lot sizes, makes it more economical to build higher-end units. But even with that, more total supply filters down and helps stabilize prices, including the lower end. The ultimate left-wing fantasy is rent control, as if regulating prices by government fiat magically solves the problem.

> >Healthcare - price transparency and make it easier to shop around. Incentivize frugality.

> Richest country on Earth ever, and we need to be frugal and maybe skip our insulin prescription this month.

No, but if you were able to shop around for a major, but scheduled, surgery such as a hip replacement, you may choose a cheaper option if you were appropriately incentivized. People already fly to foreign countries to get procedures done, because travel, hotel, and the procedure are still cheaper and higher-quality than the American healthcare system.

No more than the government not providing access to private yachts to all citizens. Equal opportunity doesn’t mean equal buying ability.

The only federal institutions of higher learning are the ETH / EPFL and their offshoots.

It seems to work pretty well.

I don’t think that’s actually true. Western Europe is often more social democratic in principles, but often quite conservative in implementation. For example, Europe relies heavily in VAT, which has theoretical benefits but is regressive. Healthcare in Germany is paid for by an insurance contribution that is much higher for the individual, but phases out on income above about $60,000 per year. Meanwhile, in the US you pay Medicare contributions on all income, and the left is pushing to make Social Security contributions the same way.

Likewise with college. Germany would pay a lot more to offer free education if it didn’t aggressively control the pipeline of students into colleges. That idea would be alien to the left in the US, where the belief is that everyone should go to college.

I don't see how you can say this. My premiums literally doubled under Obamacare and now I have a new thing called "co-insurance" meaning that I pay 20% of all bills, period.

Edit: why would I be downvoted for relating my experience?

You'd also see that my post referenced income, not wages. An important distinction, and exactly the kind that journalists don't make when they say 'incomes aren't rising' when they are, and point only to one metric (real wages) to prove it. In a sense your post is a bit ironic.

Hourly wages are absolutely important, but your own research example itself indicates it's not the end-all metric, either. For example, your study mentions a period where real wages fell, but overal compensation remained stable, due to other non-wage benefits compensating for the loss in wages. In fact, your study mentions quite clearly that health-benefits are left out of the study, despite being quite a unique aspect of private labor compensation in the US (whereas most other countries have publicly funded healthcare) and healthcare being a key category of high-inflation. So you're counting the inflation to adjust the purchasing power of wages, but you're not counting non-wage compensation of healthcare-benefits which have risen sharply.

The study of course also doesn't take into account employment changes, as the study carefully points out. i.e., the sharp increase in labor force participation of women age 25-54 in the past 2 generations, isn't taken into account if you're talking about income, only the fact the median women earns 25% more. That understates improvements in income. Where you went from 4/10 women earning $10 an hour, to now having 7/10 women earning $12.50 an hour, that'd an increase of 118% in the total income earned by women, while real wages 'only' grew by 25%.

Rather than control for each individual confounder, one can better just look at real median personal income.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

And you find it's 40% higher than in 1979. This metric isn't perfect either, but it does a better job than just looking at hourly wages for working people.

Lastly, there are some apples / oranges comparisons still left in inflation. Healthcare inflation is tricky to measure and is mostly done on a price-basis. That's different from other goods, e.g. the price of a harddrive, which goes up in nominal terms (a typical harddrive costs more than 10 years ago in dollar terms), but is adjusted for the fact it's 10x larger than it was 10 years ago. In healthcare however, we don't take into account that life expectancy has improved by about half a decade in 1979. Sometimes we tend to forget our lives are outpacing increases in pension age, i.e. we live longer and with more leisure. This, too, is a form of wealth and could be expressed as income. Instead, the only thing we tend to point to is that our healthcare costs are up, and thus if we adjust our wages by these costs (and then subsequently leave out non-wage compensation that pays for healthcare and retirement), observe that our wages are down or flat in real terms. That's short sighted.

But more importantly, I wasn't referencing the US at all.