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Great question.

Check out [1] and scroll down to Table A-7 (it's an Excel file). It's the real earnings data (in 2018 dollars), by gender, from 1960 to 2018 (though it's kind of spotty before 1967). What sticks out:

* For men (looking at Total Workers), real earnings are currently around 10% higher than they were in the 70s (moving from low-$40K's to recently just past mid-$40K's, with some peaks and valleys along the way). Doesn't sound like much, but...

* For women, earnings have roughly doubled in that timespan

* The number of men in the workforce has increased by almost 50%

* The number of women in the workforce has increased by almost 100%

From a certain perspective, it's kind of amazing that real earnings haven't gone down significantly.

In the last 20 years, median earnings, in real terms (adjusted for inflation), are up. Unemployment is at its lowest, and that's at the broadest definition of "unemployment" (U6) [2].

As for poverty, check out [3] from the US Census Bureau and scroll down to Table 6 (it’s an Excel file). It’s the percentage of people in America that are below 125% of the poverty line (I.e. near poor to absolutely poor) between 1959 and 2018. That percentage has gone down from 31% to 16%.

The median number of years to recoup the cost of a Bachelors degree in America, adjusted for inflation, has gone down since the 1980’s, from about 22 years to about 10 years. [4]

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-26...

[2] https://twitter.com/jmhorp/status/1201903269095698432

[3] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

[4] https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2014/09/the-va...




Nice work!

We often forget that things are no actually so bad.




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