David Leonhardt reports on a Census Bureau Report indicating that “the typical American household made less money last year than the typical household made a full decade ago.”
Median household fell to $50,303 last year, from $52,163 in 2007. In 1998, median income was $51,295. All these numbers are adjusted for inflation.
In the four decades that the Census Bureau has been tracking household income, there has never before been a full decade in which median income failed to rise.
. . .
It’s a combination of two trends. One, economic growth in the current decade has been slower than in any decade since before World War II. Two, inequality has risen sharply, so much of the bounty from our growth has gone to a relatively small slice of the population.
somewhere between somewhat and quite helpful…it’d be better to see compensation instead of wages– and to know whether household (vs. family) size or earners per household changed significantly…
I get where you’re going to compensation instead of wages (health care, retirement, etc), however I think both are meaningful. Wages is what people can spend, compensation gets spent for them in the case of health care and is off limits for years in the case of retirement. Seeing both would help show that companies might be paying more and employees have less to spend.
I also do think it would be very helpful to know if household income has gone down while number of people working outside the home has gone up, as I assume to be the case. If that is true, this is an even bigger problem.