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Comment by simonbarker87 | Hacker News Reader

Fair question, it’s a mix: IT admin, manufacturing project manager, primary school teacher, tree surgeon, mortgage advisor, doctor, something in finance, secondary school teacher, plumber, software developer, power electronics engineer, charity sector project lead

So a real mix

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Okay, so a lot of ~£40k a year salaries (outside of medicine and finance) to afford a £400k house when your parents might have had a £20k salary to afford an £80k house? There's a real disparity when you consider what they did too. If your parents are anything like mine, they were in the pub 4 days a week, drinking and eating with friends. I can managed that just a few times a month. Wealth compared to income from my experience is significantly lower by .lost metrics.

This paper has an excellent, readable breakdown of how compensation and productivity has changed since the 1970s.

Which paper?

Maybe you have an exceptional friend group because .. outside of your anecdata .. the statistically average salaries for many of those professions over large sample sets is below the median in the us and they are definitely not seeing their purchasing power increasing yearly

>they are definitely not seeing their purchasing power increasing yearly

In the US? Real Disposable Personal Income has been growing very consistently over time [1]. The rate of growth did stagnate between 2000 and 2013 but the trend has been remarkably consistent.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96

the per capita version of your graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0

it claims that the average person has 50k usd in disposable yearly income - there's no way that's after housing and other non optional expenses have been accounted for.

using this measurement, if wages go up 5% but rent goes up 50%, it would still look as if people have more money to spend than before.

If you consider most of this going to rich people it's more understandable. Per capita doesn't try to describe the average person.

very minimally and not in proportion to their output.

the rich are taking The Lion's share of productivity growth

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/#:~...

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