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In those instances, were there also declines in real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales? In the current climate, are those things declining? Maybe the answer to those questions help explain the discrepancy.

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Real earnings has been in a sharp decline since 2020, now mostly thanks to inflation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

I don't have the time to link the other stats, but they're not so rosy either, except employment. One good stat and several bad ones is still a recession.

I think that chart shows that things are going back to normal. The reason weekly earnings were at an all time high in q2 of 2020 is because the low wage earners all got laid off because of the pandemic. Now that things are going back to normal, the low wage earners are going back to work at approximately the same real wage (although nominally it's probably a bit higher because of inflation).

That's quite an interesting bias and probably accurate, but one issue you run into here is that wages now are lower than even Q3 2019 which is well before any of this kicked off. And the current trajectory is downward.

So it seems safe to say that real earnings are indeed decreasing, rather than regressing to some past mean.

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