Note, it's at most 1% per year. The HN headline is actually a quote from the body of the article:

> In most rich countries, real pay has grown by at most 1% per year, on average, since 2000.

The next sentence breaks out one piece of that average:

> For low-wage workers the stagnation has been more severe and prolonged: between 1979 and 2016, pay adjusted for inflation for the bottom fifth of American earners barely rose at all.

By comparison, UK property prices have doubled in nominal terms since then.

1. Real income is adjusted for inflation.

2. Property prices have multiple other factors affecting them than just GDP. For instance, if you have a large increase in population without enough new housing to account for it, then property prices naturally go up. I think that describes 21st century Britain quite well, don't you?

3. The economic dogma of blaming all problems on the rich is no different than blaming all problems on a certain ethnic group. It's just that it's not as easy to immediately recognize it as intellectually dishonest.

It’s extremely intellectually dishonest to compare people who live in extreme comfort and can afford tremendous amounts of power because of their money to people who are historically oppressed by law and culture because of their ethnicity.

Edit: Also, who has said they hate the rich? Stop propping up silly YouTube strawmen for you to take down with your logic lording.

> people who live in extreme comfort and can afford tremendous amounts of power because of their money

You do realize that the first half of your sentence is identical to a extreme nationalist argument against an ethnic group, don't you? All you would have to do is start it off with "The [insert ethnic group] are people who live in extreme comfort..."

Money objectively provides the means to purchase health services, legal services, investments, decent living spaces, etc. [Insert Ethnic Group] group does not objectively mean [insert stereotype].

I think you are most likely confusing the petite bourgeoisie (the vast majority of programmers) with the haute bourgeoisie (the monopolistic owners of our means of production, think Bezos).

The petty bourgeoisie are well off, and look to emulate and think of themselves as similar to a haute bourgeoisie like Elon Musk, but they are not, your 200,000 a year salary is closer to your porters 30k salary and you often work alongside your workers/coworkers. Our owners of the means of production, such as Tim Cooke cornering the high end hardware market, do not work alongside their employees. They view workers in the abstract, as literal numbers on paper.

It is much easier for say people like Zuckerberg and Schmidt to collude, because it’s a lot fewer people to coordinate. And this in fact happened with wage fixing in Silicon Valley between tech companies until they were caught.

I don’t know what the answer is, and it’s especially fraught in a world economy where unionizing in the USA may mean that Google simply highers programmers in Eastern Europe instead. But I do know that government should be leveraged for the people and not for big business, that’s its point and that’s currently not the case.

Money is not ethnicity.

> Money is not ethnicity.

It's the metric by which you stereotype people. You're just making my point for me.

The population has increased from 59m to 66m in this period (https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/population), an increase of 11% which is hardly overwhelming.

Are most of those 7m moving to Brockenhurst? No, they're piling into London, and new domiciles aren't keeping up, so prices are skyrocketing and pushing up the "national average".

London is something of a special case: https://londonist.com/2016/04/london-migration

I'd argue that the over-centralisation of the UK economy is a big part of the problem there; there should be as much investment in public transport in Manchester and Birmingham as there is in London.

I wonder how it stakes compared to the real GDP growth during the same period.

The US GDP has nearly doubled since 2000.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/188105/annual-gdp-of-the...

Or the inflation rate.

It's real, not nominal. Real growth takes in account inflation to find real growth, while nominal includes the effects of inflation

1% higher.

That's what real pay growth means: Nominal minus inflation.

But how much have home prices increased since 2000? How much has rent increased? How much has food prices?

19.61% increase in wages seems like a lot but if you factor in housing prices increased 100%+, prices of steaks increased 200%, etc, then that 19.61% doesn't look too good.

This is real income, so costs are already accounted for.

Inflation calculations doesn't include housing price.

I don’t know which calculations are you talking about precisely, but usually (US,EU,OECD) the hosing costs are included in the form of actaul rents, imputed rents, and maintenance costs.

Says who? They generally do.

The real lesson is statistics used in political discussion are ALWAYS manipulated into meaninglessness. If you can hear an axe grinding in the background you know the numbers are have been carefully and methodically rendered meaningless. The trick is to find statistics that aren't used (or aren't used as much) in political discussion. What is the ... divorce rate, or percentage of psychologically medicated people, or suicide rate, or addiction rate or average children per women, crime rates, immigration in or out of an area, job market trends by occupation and pay rate, ratio of local school academic spending to athletic spending, or similar non-headline metrics of success (or not success).

The Economist is a very honest publication and broadly classical liberal in the British and European sense of the term.

In fact it was voted as one of the most trustworthy sources.

You make it sound like some sensationalist rag.

"at most" does not imply consistent 1% growth year over year.

While in the same time frame inflation has been well above 1% per year all the time.

"Real X" means X, adjusted for the effects of inflation.

At most 1%.