Comment by Retric

> 1979 is when the Fed began collecting median wage data.

Making it at best absolutely worthless for your argument which I used to think was accurate. Congrats you helped change my mind.

> just give people a 2% 'raise' and they're content enough.

2% annual wage growth is well below average. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FRBATLWGTUMHWG83O

Reading up after seeing your post the death of the US union had an incredibly strong effect on median wages. The wage distribution vs 20th or 80th percentile is quite different, plus a much larger percentage of median wage earners shows up as heath insurance. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1986/09/art1full.pdf

Also, 1979 isn’t the inflection point on the graph on that page instead 1970 is. Worse inflation slowed down in 1979.