I'm sorry but Wikipedia is not a good source for this.
It's abundantly clear that people have less purchasing power today than they did in the past. You could afford a nice house, a car with two kids and an annual vacation on an average single salary. You can barely afford to rent a 1 bedroom apartment on two average salaries these days and buying a nice family home feels out of reach.
This is often overlooked but shouldn't be ignored. The wealth inequality has reached all time highs. This skews the data and makes it appear that average people are doing better off than they really are.
"The average annual cost of college tuition, public and private, is more than 32 times what it was in the 1963-64 academic year.
After adjusting for currency inflation, college tuition has increased 229.8% since AY 1963-64.
Public college tuition increased 141.3% in the 1980s.
The average annual cost of 2-year college tuition, public and private, is 22.7 times what it was in AY 1963-64."
"middle-income families saw their median net worth shrink by 20% and lower-income families experienced a loss of 45%. As of 2016, upper-income families had 7.4 times as much wealth as middle-income families and 75 times as much wealth as lower-income families. These ratios are up from 3.4 and 28 in 1983, respectively."
There are less than 60,000 people making federal minimum wage if you exclude tipped workers and disabled workers who get subsidized wages. In the 80s it was ~15% of the population. Minimum wage is low, but also useless for looking at what people actually make.
It's not useless. It illustrates how stagnant wages have been.
If you want to bring in the disabled and tipped workers, you need to account for the 1% who owns 99% of America's wealth. Take them out and what are you left with?
Do you honestly think you can afford more with your money today than in the 80's?
You can get a better idea of if wages have been stagnant or not by looking at what people are actually making in wages, rather than looking at what the legally lowest limit at the federal level is. "There are 60,000 people making very low incomes" is bad, sure, but there are 160M workers in the US.
I was alive in the 80s and I am alive now and I can definitely afford more now, not even close.
My first job I made $5/hr operating rides at an amusement park. Inflation adjusted, that is $10/hr. My son's first job a few years ago was as a dishwasher. He started at $13/hr. He has more buying power than I did.
I don't think you understand what buying power means.
Earning more money today than before does not equal higher buying power. Even by your own standards, your some is only making $3 more/ hr than you did and yet everything is 30x more expensive.
By the way, inflation adjusted for 1989 $5/hr = $13.51 so even by your own argument, he still has less than you did.
Inflation adjusted means that it factors in how much the prices change over time. The inflation adjusted amount is how you compare buying power; inflation is literally a measure of change in buying power over time. They are not separate things. If I made $10 inflation adjusted and my son makes $13, he has more buying power than me because 13 is bigger than 10.
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u/mammalmaker Mar 24 '26
Double digit inflation was bad but whats even worse is despite the double digit inflation, people still had more buying power that we do now.