It's an oft-mentioned point in the last few yearss to focus on raw income and not on spending power. if you get 50% more pay but rent doubles, the vast majority of people would have less spending power. same with job numbers. "Unemployment is historically low!". meanwhile, gig and part time worked soard while full time jobs dipped.
In addition, you look further and realize how people who "gave up" after 2-3 months without an interview are not counted as "unemployed" and you realize there's a lot to break down, that no one is breaking down
Does the median earner when considering the entire country struggle to pay rent? Or is it just the median earner in certain extremely expensive metro areas that happen to get a lot of focus in the media because that's where the journalists live?
The numbers OP cites can be 100% accurate and reflective of reality while it is still also true that people in the Bay Area struggle to pay for housing.
There is every chance that income is a multi-modal distribution, and thus one should not talk of a single median.
However, the person to whom I was replying used cheap and not-so-cheerful language to suggest that it was possible to talk about this en masse. Assuming that to be reasonable, I replied with an en masse response.
Certainly if you break it down at the county level, I expect you'd find multiple different patterns, and would then be faced with which ones to call "typical" or "indicative".
My apologies, home ownership costs are not included in inflation measures. But I was wrong and you're correct: rents are.
Which actually makes my point even more clearly: yes, there are a lot of anecdotes about not being able to make the rent, but these are not supported by the statistics for inflation and median income. Doesn't mean that they are wrong, but makes it more likely that there are other reasons for the proliferation of these stories.
but no one is digging in to talk about the regional variation. SF going back to being "still one of the highest CoL post genrification" instead of "unbearable for all but the elite" isn't exactly comforting.
I don't love the game of "someone posted a random article with some numbers that they found from a 5 minute Google search, but now I have to do the much harder & longer work of verifying if it's legitimate or misleading"
Since HN doesn't allow pasting images into comments (good!), I did not paste the numerous charts from the St. Louis Fed and others that I have bookmarked to show this data in various different ways. Also, the FRED numbers only go to 2022 in their data plotter, which is a problem if you want newer data (it exists).
What would prefer me to do? Post a dozen links that all the same thing, arguably less obviously?
I have not seen a single one yet that shows a decline in real wages.
Maybe this isn't that Axios journalist's field, but that huge spike of 9.1% annual inflation in 2022 won't be made up for by a 1% difference in 2024. Showing only the current rate and not the cumulative effects seems disingenuous.
You're both right. Real wages are down from the pandemic, but that's because they spiked massively due to the stimulus spending [1]. Real wages today are where they were in Q1 2020, which was the highest they had been since at least 1982.
Both the Axios and Journal charts are confusing because they're taking the first derivative of a complex curve.
Thanks for posting that graph. When I went to FRED to get it, i only got a data series to 2022. I consider this be the most definitive measure that I've seen yet.