Saturday, January 4, 2025

Real Median Family Income 1953-2023


2 comments:

Jerry said...

I think it only looks like it went up at all because you now need two people per household working, instead of one person. Is there another graph per-person instead of per-family?

The Arthurian said...

Real Median Household Income in the United States since 1984.

Real Median Personal Income in the United States since 1974.

Real Median Family Income in the United States since 1953.

Only three useful items, even though FRED cordially offers "825,000 US and international time series from 114 sources."
If there was anything else, maybe it was redacted for security reasons.

> I think it only looks like it went up at all because you now need two people per household working, instead of one person.

Yeah. And I wasn't even thinking about that. But on a similar theme, the 1964-1989 increase in the Labor Force Participation Rate is always taken by economists to be some kind of grand and magical improvement. I tend to think of it as a time when we (labor) did what we could to maintain our standard of living, in an economy that was tilted against us.

Let me repeat again the one interesting thing Jude Wanniski ever said: ... you have to have lived in the 1950s and 1960s to have experienced a good economy.