Comment by somenameforme

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