My apologies. Only the first chart I posted is real wages (after taking CPI changes into account). I was searching for “real wages over time” but didn’t detect that only the first result was real.
I appreciate your candor. I missed that the first chart indicated real income.
I do find it interesting that housing and living costs seem more unaffordable than the CPI data implies. I came across some Statista data that indicates that real hourly earnings fell for non-managerial workers from a high in 1964 and took nearly 60 years to recover in 2019[0]:
> On average, workers in the United States in nonsupervisory positions got paid $23.38 an hour last month. Denominated in constant 1982-1984 dollars, that amounts to real average hourly earnings of $9.40, the highest amount on record since 1964.
I could be wrong but I imagine that many of these workers were probably hit harder by the pandemic and current inflation than those lucky enough to be able to work through it.
> I do find it interesting that housing and living costs seem more unaffordable than the CPI data implies.
I agree with you that things "feel worse" than the data suggests. I asked an old friend a while ago about this, observing "I never worried about how much going out to eat cost 20 years ago, and I was making a lot less money then. Now, it seems so expensive."
"You have a family, house, and retirement to think about now" was his answer.
Part of the spread in feeling vs CPI is likely that CPI represents reported purchases. If people want steak and buy ground beef, CPI reports on the ground beef while you and I in daily life might be noticing our desire for the steak.
That's a 2.5x - 3x increase since 1975, which is huge given that it is the single most expensive thing that anybody buys in their life. If you take housing out of the equation, most people I know wouldn't need to worry about money.
For housing, I think you have to back out the effects of interest rates as well, since the purchase price isn't what hits the monthly budget of households, but rather the payment price. I don't know what the reputable sources for UK mortgage rates are, but in the US, until quite recently, mortgage rates were about 30-45% of what they were in 1975 (~9%), so I'd expect the same monthly budget in real dollars to show up as a lot more capital buying power (expressed as a purchase price).
> "You have a family, house, and retirement to think about now" was his answer.
That's a fair point from an individual perspective. Although, it's concerning that society as a whole appears to be experiencing the same shift.
> Part of the spread in feeling vs CPI is likely that CPI represents reported purchases. If people want steak and buy ground beef, CPI reports on the ground beef while you and I in daily life might be noticing our desire for the steak.
That's true. I also suspect that people that were struggling before have been impacted much more severely by price rises. In my country, prices in budget supermarkets have increased by a much greater percentage[0]. Own brand products seem to have been affected even more[0]:
> we found other Tesco products, including Hearty Food Co Two Garlic Chicken Kievs (260g), Grower's Harvest Orange Juice (3 x 200ml) and Rosedene Farms Small Pear Pack (550g), all soaring by more than 60% in price.
> At Asda, two versions of its Free From cream cheese products – its Soft Cheese Alternative (170g) and its Garlic & Herb Soft Cheese Alternative (170g) – went up from 93p to £2.12, an increase of 128%.
The CPI for rent is more than double what it was in 2000: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SEHA