I'm not sure what use it is to consider the "average american". I'm concerned about the cohort of people who are barely scraping by, you seem to paint a picture that these peoples lives have improved because their "real income" has grown substantially. Ok so they were barely making rent at 15k/year, and their real wages increase by 5k/year since 2010. Has their rent remained stable over the last then years? Perhaps these quotable numbers aren't all that useful except to further marginalize?
Correct, which is why we adjust for inflation, and there are a ton of different inflation indexes one can use. Per the links in the source comment, regardless of which index you use, we have seen an increase in income.
> Has their rent remained stable over the last then years?
From the data, outside of expensive coastal metros, yes. If you don't have a college education, you're more likely to enjoy a higher standard of living in Little Rock, Arkansas or Minneapolis, MN than in San Francisco or Manhattan.
> Perhaps these quotable numbers aren't all that useful except to further marginalize?
No, these quotable numbers tell us that we're generally trending in the right direction. Therefore, any solution we employ to help those that are the poorest among us (which is important) doesn't necessarily need to upend the entire system.
> From the data, outside of expensive coastal metros, yes. If you don't have a college education, you're more likely to enjoy a higher standard of living in Little Rock, Arkansas or Minneapolis, MN than in San Francisco or Manhattan.
Are we comparing a person in one location to another? I thought we were talking about improvements year over year.
> Are we comparing a person in one location to another? I thought we were talking about improvements year over year.
We're doing both. And in both metrics, the bottom are the best off today than ever before. Unfortunately, the bottom were really poor in the 20th century, so being better than that (while good), doesn't mean our work as a society is complete. But that's a welfare problem, not a "what is the system like for the average American" problem.
It's also worth noting that, in America, the bottom 3 quintiles are extremely underrepresented in the highest COL metros. That's just not where they're concentrated. Given the purchasing power disparity between US states, the variance in the US-level data is probably too wide to be useful, and you kind of have to compare from State-to-State -> https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2019/12/1.... Once you account for that, the root causes also become easier to identify — predominately local land use policy.
