• Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    It’s funny because the two charts I’ve linked, from the Fed, one for median wages and the other for inflation, together add up to quite a different image, leaving us with 3 possible explanations:

    • that chart your provided is bullshit
    • it’s the Fed’s own data that’s bullshit and your chart is right
    • they’re both right, and yours being average and the Fed’s being median, neatly proves the point I’ve been making that average wage figures are unrepresentative of the experience of most people because slary growth for top wage earners pulls the average up even whilst most people don’t see any of that wage “growth”

    Curiously the comment on your chart about the values around the Covid period reinforce my 3rd point: the chart got a massive jump then because low earners lost their jobs much more than high earners, not because salaries actually went up.

    • iopq@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Median wage reflects the wage of one person who’s exactly in the middle. The average of the middle quantile also adds ten million people on the left and right side

      It’s actually not very different from the median real wages

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