Well, I did, just not in the way you were looking for.

Basically, it’s more complicated than that. When we talk about wage growth, we have to start with the question “Relative to what?”

So, the actual math says that, relative to overall absolute inflation, wages have, broadly, kept up. Adjusted for inflation, median US income in 1970 was about $84,800 (just using the US as an easy example here). Today’s median income in the US is about $83,800. So, like, it’s less, but not dramatically less. Statistically, those are the same number.

But that comes with a lot of caveats. First, we’re talking about wages as a whole, but that includes, you know, CEOs. And guys making $300,000 a year to write fintech software. While the aggregate of those wages have kept up, more or less, the distribution is increasingly skewed. That’s the problem with averages; they flatten out the details.

The second caveat is the one that I already touched on, that the things we want are cheaper but the things we need are way more expensive. In 1970 the median price for a TV would be $3500 in today’s money. And that applies to things like refrigerators, stoves, all kinds of stuff. But the price of a house was only a few years of your income.

But there’s also the fact that we shouldn’t just measure against inflation. When you measure wages against productivity, that’s where you see an almost total lack of growth since the seventies. So while it is mathematically accurate to say that - in aggregate - wages have kept in line with inflation it’s also completely reasonable to question why they’re not higher. If productivity keeps going up, shouldn’t we all have more stuff now than we did then? That’s what wages and costs ultimately boil down to; the things we can have. And in a world with so much more productivity it’s crazy that having a house and two cars was easier in the 1970s than it is today.