Comment by Retric
6 hours ago
Wow, being that deceptive implies your argument is false.
You imply there some something different around that date, but only show data prior to that date for one of those lines. WTF.
Dig a little deeper and the median wage is calculated by literally asking people roughly what they make and changing the methodology in 1994. Health insurance alone is a big difference in the ratio of people’s nominal wages and their actual incomes between those dates.
1979 is when the Fed began collecting median wage data. Here [1] is inflation data since 1947. You can see that 1979 was well into the funny money inflation era. The reason this is relevant is that it's impractical to literally lower wages - that's going to turn your labor force hostile like nothing else. But with inflation this is suddenly very easy to do - just give people a 2% 'raise' and they're content enough. Some might even be happy, even though that's generally a direct pay cut, thanks to inflation.
Real wages started becoming grossly detached from other metrics in society once inflation started going wild, and I don't think it's just a coincidence. In any case this is why it's very reasonable to think that real wages were even higher prior to 1979.
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL