> Real wages are lower than their pandemic highs, but higher than they've been at any point since late 2019

This description is self-contradictory. I think you mean “before” not “since”.

In 2013, there was no Ukraininian war, and China and Japan willing to hold huge chunk of American bonds to allow financing of Afghan-Iraq wars. There is no brics too with cryptocurrencies/digital negligible on the far far fringe. Today, American concluded Afghan and Iraq wars with humiliation defeat. Entire "war investments" didn't yielded a single embassy over there let alone the fable 3T$ mining rights of lithium there. Chinese now actively pursuing space explorations and photonic chips while US losing tons of bright Indian+Chinese scholars coming over. Plus, in terms of poor people and population growth, there are more today than 2013. Plus Siberia is thawing making Russia now more hospitalable than Bush time. Non of American hypersonic missiles operational while Russian and Chinese are in the process of changing all their nuke missiles to newer missiles. American Patriots and Thaad are widely jokes in military industries. And the greatest kicker is in the east for centuries there are prophecies of American destructions from possibily nukes. Even John Titor in the early Bush era or late Clinton era hinted his timeline USA nuked by Russia and China. With current Biden and woke cultures permeating entire USA, those kind of economic numbers would force American governments to do very stupid thing since lacking room to manuerve. It's canary, but dead or alive, miners dont care.