What we really care about are the people who are persistently in poverty and whether or not that number grows or shrinks. If it shrinks the economy is helping real people, if it's not, it's helping the well off.
Or do you argue that people are bouncing between jobs with lower wage growth and higher wage growth, so the bottom 25% of wages are getting worse and worse, yet they are only temporary?
It seems pretty clear that 25% of earners experience no growth or negative growth YoY while 25% of earners see wage growth that outpaces inflation. Unless they are swapping places constantly, it's not really healthy for this to occur over a long period of time (as it has).
Again... you want to look at the number of people in poverty. That's the true metric of an economy, not the unemployment number.
I can have 3x the income of monthly food budget (poverty threshold). What happens when housing per month is also 3x the cost of food per month?
Poverty threshold is a poor indicator of the economic health. Poverty can lower while the ability for the average citizen to support a family continues to drop.
> Are you arguing there's not increasing mobility, with this new fangled internet and the series of tubes and what have you?
That's not an argument. Technological improvements can result in consolidation of capital and rising inequality. Something like that would be indicated by... top 25% of wage earners outpacing inflation while bottom 25% continue to stagnate or fall behind.
EDIT: The last poverty rate publication showed the supplemental poverty rate rising (taking into account more factors that traditional poverty rate). Previous to the pandemic, they were largely correlated. We will have to wait until the 2024 results to see if the inversion holds true.
source: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
One way to think of an economy is GDP/stock market/etc. Another way to think of it is: "What is the maximum level of poverty before there's a revolution?" Moving people from the poverty class to the middle class should be a basic goal for any economy -- because it's likely to affect the most citizens.
> That's not an argument.
So if you're in small town Nebraska in 1910/20/30/40/50/60/70/80/90's, it was super hard to learn calculus (one example) unless you enrolled in college and traveled to the university/college, etc. Why? No one else knew it, nor could they teach it.
Back before 2000's era, people were held back, mostly based upon where they were born. In the internet era, you can be a millionaire/billionaire without having to travel to the shit hole that is silicon valley. Amazing!
Edit:
I saw your edit, and yes, you would expect poverty to go up in a down turn economy. But you would also expect it to go down if economic gains are truly affecting everyone, and not just the rich or upper middle class.
They provide this definition: Wage Growth Tracker is a measure of the nominal wage growth of individuals. It is constructed using microdata from the Current Population Survey (CPS), and is the median percent change in the hourly wage of individuals observed 12 months apart.
Chart 1 plots the time series of the median, along with the mean, and the 75th and 25th percentiles of the individual wage growth distribution
I believe this chart will almost always show little or negative numbers for the bottom 25% of wage growth. By definition.
Still trying to make time to play with the data myself but I suspect it won’t really contain the information I want.
Again, you need to look the number of people in poverty. Is it growing or shrinking? That's the true metric of an economy.
When you get to 50% or more in poverty, that's revolution territory.