I suspect a lot of those who have moved back into their parents’ homes were likely earning below the median household income. Remove them as a household, and suddenly the median family is one higher on the income scale.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/01/the-number-...
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/familie...
The pew article also looks at statistics like "In 2019, 20% of households are shared households, up from 17% in 2007."
The weakness in the pew article is it's forecasting growth in household size from one year of its model, obviously we need to wait more time to see if it's model is correct.
But the 2010 "American Community Survey" says the average houshold size is 2.63 (https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=b25010&tid=ACSDT1Y201...), so for this survey the trend is flat.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-26...
From which they conclude "In 2019, 20% of households are shared households, up from 17% in 2007."
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/05/a-record-64...
from which they mention "By 2016, 20% of Americans lived in a multigenerational household, up from 12% in 1980"
One survey is one survey, multiple data points from a set of different perspectives is more comprehensive an analysis and less susceptible to single measurement methodology errors.
The main thing I take from this is that movement of a household income number is fairy meaningless unless you also know what household size number is measured or calculated with the income number.
We're looking at is households, and the easiest way to explain this jump is actually that the economy is more fucked than ever and more working age people are living together. If we consider the type articles you're referencing, that have been noting the migration of young, educated, working-age adults back to their parents homes in the USA-- we should very well expect to see a large spike in the reported median household income. The same growth would be true if more people were living in situations with roommates where ideally they wouldn't.
Here's the definition of a household from the linked article:
> A family household is a household maintained by a householder who is related to at least one other person in the house-hold by birth, marriage, or adoption and includes any unrelated individuals who may be residing there. A nonfamily household is a householder living alone (a one-person household) or sharing the home exclusively with nonrelatives.
Addendum: I'd like to note, that even if household size itself appears to be low; that's likely due to reproduction rates being on the decline as more people, on average, are having smaller families each year...
> the real median earnings of full-time, year-round workers increased 0.8 percent between 2018 and 2019
Seems like this is the wealth gap, coupled with an increase of the proportion of females working full-time in the workforce.
> The number of females who were full-time, year-round workers increased by about 1.2 million between 2018 and 2019, while the change for their male counterparts was not statistically significant.
Reminds me of Simpson's paradox.
From: https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/family/what-are-depende...
Yeah, in many ways a more interesting figure would be median adult income, but household (which has real comparability problems across time) is the popular number.
Men - +2.5%
Women - +7.8%
And is still not individual adult median income, and like median household income is a measure whose rise can indicate bad outcomes: where with median household income the factor that causes this is that it increases, cet. par., with more adults/household, with median individual workers it goes up if people who were previously working but at the low end of the distribution just lose their jobs.
As a simple case, consider a situation with 100% enployment and any non-uniform income distribution you want as the “before”, and the situation where everyone below the median in the “before” loses their job and has 0 income as the “after”, while everyone else remains employed with the same income as before.
What happened to individual worker median income?
What happened to individual median income?
https://www.epi.org/blog/household-income-gains-welcome-in-2...
> the data was collected between February and April of this year,
Collected here means tabulated. The data reflect changes in hhold income from 2018 to 2019.
> Overall, non-response increased significantly and was more strongly associated with income than in previous years, with non-response decreasing with income, meaning that income data could be skewed higher than it actually was.
I don't see how calculations would trend in a particular direction if they weren't literally collected in this calendar year.
It's still confusing as hell.
Also, is this addendum, by the census themselves:
> When correcting for non-response bias in 2019, the Census found that real median income was $66,790, 2.8% lower than reported in the official release.
This report uses the characteristics of the householder to describe the household. The householder is the person (or one of the people) in whose name the home is owned or rented and the person to whom the relationship of other household members is recorded. If a married couple owns the home jointly, either spouse may be listed as the householder. Since only one person in each household is designated as the householder, the number of householders is equal to the number of households. The count of households in this report excludes group quarters.
Further definitions are held here: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/techdocs/cpsmar...
(dont have time to parse through, but I suspect that there is only one head of household, and thus it means a child who is 18+ living with their parents, they are basically aren't even considered in the calculation)