this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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Yeah, they cherry-pick that average income is up vs previous generations, adjusted for inflation.
Okay, but… cost of living has gone up.
Not just for the things that existed 40 years ago, but also from the new things that are necessary for maintaining a career, like broadband internet and a smartphone.
Needing a fucking subscription for your toaster or hair dryer or stairs or whatever. Having to tip your landlord.
They had a guy in the article that owes 200k in student loans! This is not apples-to-apples.
And also, so what if it’s up in average? Inequality is the worst it’s ever been. They barely sneak an asterisk in to address that, too.
Average income isn't even useful because the only salaries that have gone up are CEOs.
Average real income (adjusted for inflation) has been pretty steady in the last 50 years for the bottom 50% bracket. The higher up you go in the income bracket the higher the growth becomes. The real income of the top 0.01% has grown by 670% in that same time. So you can see where all that extra wealth generated from 2x productivity boost has gone. Trickle up economics.
Source with nice graphs
*This is for the USA, but if you look at data for other countries the tendency is the same.
"trickle up economics"
Aka ... Capitalism
UK hasn't seen that same productivity increase but has seen the increasing inequality.
We know it's bullshit so we stopped trying to work hard.
Everything else can be argued when it comes to growth/wages, but by far the single most crippling issue we have in the US is massive debt to survive, and once you're in debt, you often never get out.
We had a term for this in the middle-ages.
History repeats over and over.
yeah average means we have mcmansions now. Let me know when modal is up compared to inflation. Or average of the second and third quartile (rich is where most of it is at but poorest its to easy for it to rise without effectively doing anything for them)