Nominal wages being up rejects the hypothesis that folks are being downsized into lower-paying roles.
Median weekly earnings of the nation's 121.0 million full-time wage and salary workers were $1,235 in the first quarter of 2026 (not seasonally adjusted), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This was 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.7 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period.
Edit: 4.2% (2025) vs 4.3% (2026).
Here's a new one. Musk goes to a concert. On average everyone there is a billionaire.
The average person earns an average salary doing something very different to the stuff we on HN stress about.
your local datacenter does not care about local chickens or eggs, or private tutor, or pretty much anything at all. not even energy, it is has its own nucleaer reactor nearby. it is one-way economy from now on. you are only a consumer, not a producer. there is virtually nothing you (nor average joe) can provide that "datacenter" needs.
Yes, if you get to pick prices of arbitrary items to compare against, it's easy to come to whatever conclusion you want[1]. That's why CPI uses a basket of goods, specifically to avoid cherry picking shenanigans.
[1] https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/cpi2022junea-...
The BLS agrees. That's why "shelter" is weighted 35.6% in the CPI basket, by far the biggest item.
> I couldn't care less about all the other categories, personally.
If we're going by what people "care" about (whatever that means), the basket would probably be like 70% gas prices, 20% grocery prices, and 10% for everything else. Empirically speaking, those two are far more salient politically than housing.
Rent is a bigger consideration for most people i know, but most people i know take public transit.
Also keep in mind: people's rents don't suddenly triple in the span of a month when the president starts another illegal war... The shock value of gas, uh, shocks makes it easier to talk about than the slow relentless squeezing of the working class via rent increases that outpace inflation and wages
Electricity is even worse.
Petroleum also impacts industrial goods prices, flight costs, etc. It's more than just a talking point for drivers.
If you want to understand something else, use the measures and data that are focused on that something else. Right tool for the job and all that.
Careful.
Much of the western world has healthcare that is free at the point of use and paid for by taxation; one cannot extrapolate consumer inflationary healthcare costs in quite the manner the USA does.
Right, because it's not "essentials price index" or whatever.
>as it would be picking "arbitrary items" such as the essentials: food, shelter, medical care, and transportation that would paint a picture distinctly less fine.
The BLS makes the constituent price indices available as well as their weights, so you can easily vibecode an "essentials" index.
[1] Mostly thanks to computers/software making housing a more compelling proposition. Historically, people couldn't wait to get outside or over to the pub and would allocate their spending to support that, but now that they prefer to stay in to look at screens, they deem that place where they spend time worthy of greater spending instead.