What they never measure is the big rise in BS near-substinence hand-to-mouth jobs over higher quality gigs - which is the case in many (most?) countries...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252881600A
Combining the U6 unemployment rate with the real median earnings paints a more complete picture.
Like probabilities in research, with the right adjustments everything can be painted to be at historic highs.
First the graph starts at 310 and focuses on 310 to 360 on the y-axis, so that the meagre 330 (1979) to 355 (today) change (despite productivity/GDP etc soaring in between years) to seem huge.
Second, the inflation-adjustment heuristics are such a creative field for governments that can be used to paint pictures of wage triumph in the Weimar Republic even. Sometimes you don't even have to mess with the heuristic, just leave criteria the same when totally different costs of living have emerged.
Okay sure, we're now arguing something completely different: whether or not the inflation-adjusted increase in median income is "meagre". Keeping in mind that, in real-terms, we saw a 12% increase in the real wage since 1981 (6% increase since 1979, following a plunge between 1979-1981), check out [1] and scroll down to Table A-7 (it's an Excel file). It's the real earnings data (in 2018 dollars), by gender, from 1960 to 2018 (though it's kind of spotty before 1967). What sticks out:
* For men (looking at Total Workers), real earnings are currently around 10% higher than they were in the 70s (moving from low-$40K's to recently just past mid-$40K's, with some peaks and valleys along the way). Doesn't sound like much, but...
* For women, earnings have roughly doubled in that timespan
* The number of men in the workforce has increased by almost 50%
* The number of women in the workforce has increased by almost 100%
From a certain perspective, it's kind of amazing that real earnings haven't gone down significantly. The share of people eating from the economic pie has dramatically increased, and that too, equitably across the genders.
And none of this takes into account that while the real median income has increased a modest amount, the composition of the distribution is constantly in flux. That is to say, a given individual does not remain in the median for their lifetime, on average (THAT would be meagre). Looking at IRS tax filing since 1968, ~70% of Americans spent at least 1 year in the top 20 percent of the income distribution [2][3]. So while the shape of the distribution looks similar over time, the composition of it changes dramatically.
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-26...
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/...
[3] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...