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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

"Paul paints a rosy picture but doesn't mention that incomes for lower and middle-class families have fallen since the 80s."

Doesn't look like it: median income in 2019 was $44K, in 2001 it was $31K. That's adjusted for inflation. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_States

I don't like it when the facts look wrong after two minutes' googling.

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The same Wikipedia article notes that the increase in median income is due to increasing women’s wages and increased participation of women in the labor force.

> While wages for women have increased greatly, median earnings of male wage earners have remained stagnant since the late 1970s. Household income, however, has risen due to the increasing number of households with more than one income earner and women's increased presence in the labor force.

It is interesting how much easier the stats for 50th percentile plus are easier to find than anything below that. Also only 2 minute of googling, but 6/6 pages I checked provided either median or median as well as 60-99th percentile. None showed anything below.

Not speculating on what those stats are, and I'm sure they're out there somewhere, but certainly less available or SEO'd.

Inflation isn't exactly a single objective truth as you can decide how to measure it.

For example looking at the number of median salaries required to buy a house tells a different story.

Agreed, that is a very weird sentence when the chart clearly doesn’t show the same thing. Not sure what the author meant.

> But middle-class incomes have not grown at the rate of upper-tier incomes. From 1970 to 2018, the median middle-class income increased from $58,100 to $86,600, a gain of 49%.10 This was considerably less than the 64% increase for upper-income households, whose median income increased from $126,100 in 1970 to $207,400 in 2018. Households in the lower-income tier experienced a gain of 43%, from $20,000 in 1970 to $28,700 in 2018. (Incomes are expressed in 2018 dollars.)

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

The graphs in the blog posted are from this pew article.

Dam, I didn't know the 80s started in 2001. Or is it just that that's the chart you can find with "two minutes' googling" and so that has to be good enough because that's the amount of effort it takes to find something that vaguely seems to satisfy your confirmation bias?

Okay, though, let's just look at the chart you link. Let's assume that "inflation adjusted dollars" tracks purchasing power parity perfectly over that period and look at these numbers in relative terms, because that's what actually matters for stuff like "Who is competing to buy the limited housing stock available" or other things that actually matter to people and aren't just numerical games

31k to 44k? Cool. Seems like a lot. That's a 33% increase in the median income over that period! Over the same period, the top 20% bucket on the same chart grew from about 67k to about 103k, or by about 50%. The .0001% income bucket grew from 30m to about 60m, or about 100%. Keep in mind that the marginal value of extra dollars is considerably higher the fewer dollars you're making. So over this period of time, the Gini Coefficient, which measures inequality, has drastically increased, which is what you'd expect given the argument the article is making

Now, maybe your point is that the one number, the median income, that you're talking about has gone, I dunno, vaguely up in some period of time. It seems like this misses the point of the article in favor of nitpicking about a minor factual error. "Look!", you might say, "they said median income went down when really it went up!" That seems to be your entire argument here, and it's fucking stupid, because if you're going to fixate on a minor factual nitpick, at least get your facts right. 2001 is generously a whole decade and some change out from the 80s

let's just do away with any attempt at sticking to the facts, and stick to the vibe of the thing.

to me, you are doing the nitpicking. picking 2001 was generous, the growth is far greater if you look back to the 80s.

But the vibe of the thing is about income inequality, and it's good that it is, because the value of money isn't fixed. Only rich people staring at a stock portfolio care about "number went up", what most people care about is their real purchasing power. Right now, the income you need to qualify for a mortgage on a house in the US is around the ~80-85th percentile mark of household income, generously. The Gini Coefficient is mentioned by the linked article exactly because income inequality is really important for what someone's effective purchasing power is, partially because some markets, like housing, are priced in a competitive manner, which is why I keep mentioning housing (Also, it's a huge factor in people's material living conditions, and a cost that has risen far faster than "inflation" in all of the periods discussed so far, which is the kind of phenomenon you can't really explain by trying to do big broad averages in "adjusted dollars" but which measuring things like inequality can tease out causal factors for a lot better).

If we're just going by vibes, the overwhelming vibe (which is also supported by the numbers) is that income inequality is increasing and that this is a huge problem, and it seems like most of the people who don't feel this way are pretty decidedly in the small portion of the population for whom this is working out. It doesn't surprise me that people here don't vibe with that. Based on the forum alone, I'd bet all the people in this thread are at least in the 80th percentile of US household income (adjusted for local purchasing power if you happen to live elsewhere). If this wasn't the vibe in 2021, Paul Graham wouldn't have been writing bullshit to try to dismiss said vibe, and this person wouldn't be responding to him

yes, philosophically and by the vibes, we are in complete agreement. clearly inequality is growing, clearly that is bad.

but you're doing a disservice with completely bogus claims like "incomes for lower and middle-class families have fallen since the 80s". it only makes it harder to talk about the real issues and facts, because why would the other side stick to them now? the trust between sides gets further eroded and the gap widens

there's enough real data that we don't have to start making stuff up. the author could have easily pointed to housing instead like you. i think it's actually extremely important to get these facts right. enough to argue about on an internet forum on a sunday evening

I agree that the author made an imperfect argument and probably should not make factual claims that aren't supported by data. I think people arguing in bad faith tend to pick up on this kind of error because, like the commenter I responded to, they feel that their ability to refute anything about the argument means they've refuted the argument. My intent in responding was to point out that this is stupid, and that no one writing informally can really make an unassailable factual argument, which I did by doing the same kind of stupid nitpicking on their nitpick. Finding the weakest peripheral claim made in an argument is essentially always a fractal recursion into increasingly banal minutiae that serves no one except people like me who are trying to procrastinate on actual work by writing comments on a dumb aggregator website where devs argue for fun. I think we are in agreement at most of the self-similar layers of this

income inequality is really important for what someone's effective purchasing power is

Not really. Bill Gates isn't bidding up the prices of homes or groceries in your neighborhood.

Also, it's a huge factor in people's material living conditions, and a cost that has risen far faster than "inflation"

Yes, housing is far too expensive. And the main reason for that is state and local governments forcibly preventing people from building more housing, which is hard to blame on free markets.

most of the people who don't feel this way are pretty decidedly in the small portion of the population for whom this is working out

The point of the "minor factual nitpick" that median incomes are increasing rather than decreasing is exactly that capitalism works out pretty well for lots of people other than the wealthy.

Groceries? Maybe not. Houses? Absolutely. I mean I don't know about Bill Gates in particular, but the overwhelming majority of wealthy people have diverse portfolios, including in real estate, which means that large companies or funds are making offers in cash for houses they're not planning to live in, which drives up prices in aggregate. It's not the only factor, but it's actually a significant one. Yes, housing stock is artificially limited for bad reasons. Also, the relative value of real estate near cities is, in an era where remote work is pretty feasible but a lot of companies don't allow it, artificially skewed toward the population centers people are forced to move to for work. That these are also factors does not imply that inequality isn't one

Also, reducing the entire question of whether something has gone wrong and what and what one might do about it to a binary of "capitalism good" or "capitalism bad" is pretty pointless. Lots of things we could call capitalism have worked out really differently from each other, and looking at what the aggregate trends are and what policies might drive them and how they might be adjusted to better people's situations is a lot more useful than pretending that this is about "capitalism" versus "not capitalism", which so far as I can tell you are the first person in the thread to do, including the author of the linked article

Or is it just that that's the chart you can find with "two minutes' googling" and so that has to be good enough because that's the amount of effort it takes to find something that vaguely seems to satisfy your confirmation bias?

Here's median income going back to 1975 which shows an even larger increase: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

The left likes to constantly watch and complain of how much money others have.

It's amazing how petty they are, behaviors frequently seen in 5 year old children, and in leftist adults.

Waaaah waaah, the size of his cake is bigger. Waaaaah

Building strawmen and characterizing roughly 50% of the population as crying babies on the basis of you not agreeing with their politics sure seems like something a very mature and collected person would do.

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