What? Plainly wrong.
Wtf does that even mean? "Fake category?" Like you don't believe in the existence of suicide and drug overdose? Or you don't believe it's proper to combine those things? Either way you slice it, suicide and drug overdose are skyrocketing. When someone says "deaths of despair are up" and your response is "eh, achtually, that's a fake category!" you're being an overly-tedious dick. You know exactly what I was saying. As someone that lost their little brother to addiction 2 years ago, deaths of despair are very much not a "fake category" and you ought to be a little more careful with your words when talking about these things. Millions of Americans have had their lives devastated by this "fake category". At best, you're just being very reckless and callous with your words.
What upside-down reality are you existing in? Wages have been flat for 40 years. Job satisfaction and morale in the economy are extremely low. The rising labor movement has been driven by this low job satisfaction. Unionization and work stoppages are happening around the country as a result of this.
Plainly right, you mean. Your graphs are very dated. Generally, if you're interested in a metric and it's change over time, just search FRED. When you pull it off old articles, it will inevitably be old and likely skewed to reflect the story that the person who put it together was trying to tell.
Here's real median wages:
And note that it goes up in recessions because of composition effects (when a lot of people lose their jobs, average wages rise because lower-paid workers are losing their jobs--and then post-recovery, median wages fall as lower-paid workers get their jobs back). BTW, you can also see the deceptiveness in the people trying to push the stagnation theory when you look at the full data (that is, they pick an anomalously high point to compare to).
Job satisfaction has been rising since the depths of the GFC, and hit all-time highs last year. Prime age employment-population ratio is at an all-time high. The share of total net worth of the bottom 50% (good measure of equality) has been rising since 2011 with some skips (recent high was in Q2 2022).
Etc. By measures that people have traditionally used to measure the strength of the economy, it's at or near all-time highs. And inequality plateaued about a decade ago and has been falling more recently (as mentioned, wealth inequality has been falling since 2011, and income inequality started falling in 2020). Equality is not near all-time highs, but it is improving, and that's in the context of an extraordinarily strong overall economy.
Yeah, flat wages for 50 y
The prices of the most important things in life - housing, education and healthcare, have all exploded out of control. The next generation of salary earners, family starters and business creators, are being eviscerated by student loans. Home ownership is out of reach for the middle class. Healthcare expenses are ruining families. Families are being torn asunder by suicide and drug addiction. Americans have no savings and will be ruined by the smallest of financial problems. And you want to tell everyone things are amazing.
Ok Steven Pinker.
Again, it's simply a lie that wages have been flat for 50 years. Home ownership rates for 25-year-olds over time are pretty unchanged (that's how you measure the thing you're talking about, as obviously younger people are less likely to own homes than older people). Savings were off the charts high because of the pandemic, but then have come down to still extremely high levels by historical standards. I think if you just look honestly at reality and don't project your own hatred for the country and unhappiness out to the world, you'll see that things are pretty amazing. It's it great for 100% of the population? No. Never has been. But things have been getting progressively better, and that process will continue.
