which is an utterly useless metric unless it also takes how the world surrounding us has changed. Just from numbers in the article, housing has become 10 times as expensive, and the millenial generation has a significantly higher debt. I didn't know college graduates made 70k in the 60s, it sounds like an absurdly high number and if I were to guess what kind of salary you'd need to have today to have the same lifestyle and financial security I'd say its at least 250k.
You’re mixing inflation adjusted versus non inflation adjusted numbers. $70,000 is adjusted for inflation. Housing costs have increased faster than inflation in some places, but not by a factor of 10. Indeed, nationally, the price per square foot for housing has stayed pretty stable for the last 40 years: https://www.supermoney.com/2019/01/inflation-adjusted-home-p...
There are two aspects to that trend:
1) People are buying bigger houses. That is consistent with the fact that they’re making more money. Instead of just having extra money, they’re buying bigger houses.
2) People are buying new houses in the south, where they’re cheap. That makes sense too. A house in Palo Alto is a lot more than it was in 1970. But Palo Alto wasn’t Palo Alto in 1970. Today it’s East Egg. Your $2.5 million is buying you into a haven for the elite. But back then, it was Round Rock. You were buying into a nice, but otherwise ordinary suburb. You can still buy a nice family house in a good school district for $250,000 in Round Rock.
Real wages are stagnating. Workers are being kept in subsistence. [1]
From my point of view, tech-job market seems to be rigged. There seems to be a huge demand for talent, yet companies willing to pay meaningfully more to attract it are few in between.
Millennial households headed by college graduates have an income over $100,000: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/millennial-life-how-yo.... For the silent generation in 1968, that was under $70,000 (in inflation adjusted dollars).