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Originally Posted by lawfin
So yes median household income has increased since 1975.....however when you factor in that in 1975 there was much more single income households, and people drove far less to work / home / shopping etc; it may not be that far off to say we were better off back then at least at the level of perceived economic stress
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This guy didn't say "economic stress has increased since 1975" which is actually a statement I'd agree with per one of my follow-up posts (i.e. we've used debt to bridge the gap between our median incomes and our perception of what a median lifestyle/standard-of-living should be) --- no, he said incomes have "plummeted since the 1970s". It's objectively a false statement no matter how one defines "income," be it on a median household or a per capita basis, or by applying any reasonable measure of inflation (and this is not even getting into the fact that one could make a strong argument that using CPI understates the utility afforded by income growth, because of it's inherently poor handling of the
substitution effect).
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Originally Posted by mhays
There are so many ways to count income.
For example, is yours median or average?
Also, you can count per capita or count by household. If you're counting by household, since households have gotten dramatically smaller, the line you're showing would be a lot flatter.
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The reason I didn't cite median household income is specifically because of its codependence with household sizes, which have shrunk. With declining household sizes, median household income growth would generally understate the increase in earnings on a per worker basis, but the adjustments to make a 1975-2008 comparison meaningful are many and debatable.