real wages for the bottom 80% have not budged much[1], and are pretty much non-existent for the bottom 40-60% of the distribution.

The US has higher wages but mostly as a function of some sort of Baumol's cost disease. Increases in healthcare and education spending drive wages but they also drive costs. It doesn't really reflect a net gain in standards of living as hard stats like life expectancy show. the US has a life expectancy comparable to Cuba.

Not to mention that averages obfuscate the huge degree of inequality. Life expectancy differences between the richest and poorest in the US are larger (almost ~20 years) than between the American average and Yemen.

[1] https://imgur.com/vsUt8rF

Most of these charts ignore non-wage income such as employer paid healthcare. https://medium.com/@russroberts/do-the-rich-capture-all-the-...

It seems like Russ is trying to make a fundamentally different point in that piece than people generally try to make.

His main point seems to be that, if you track people over the last 30 years, they have made economic progress individually. That to me seems extremely obvious though. Someone who is 50 or 60 is almost certainly going to be in a better financial position than the same person at 30, as many people tend to develop more skills or advance their career, it would be straight-up crazy if that wasn't the case.

However, it does not address the actual issue of the poorest as a demographic. What people are saying that if the nation as a whole gets richer, you would expect that 40 years later the floor has risen as well, not that the poor are simply different people.

No it also looks at income across generations within quartiles, e.g. "But [incomes of] 93% of the children in the poorest households — those in the bottom 20% — surpassed their parents...Julia Isaacs’s study for the Pew Charitable Trusts looking at the late 1960’s up to 2002 finds that children raised in the poorest families made the largest gains as adults relative to children born into richer families."

Total compensation (wages + benefits) has drastically increased over the past few decades, even for the low incomes levels.

And the cost of benefits compared to what they actually buy you have also drastically increased. Control for the inflation in the cost of those benefits as well as inflation in the cost of rent, education and so on and you will see that the situation is not good.

Well it seems like “real wages” have not increased in decades?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

Comparing US wages to countries that have far greater social safety nets and healthcare is impossible. And volatility of wages and the insecurity of not knowing if you will have stable work (and hence healthcare) or not is a more important metric, although also impossible to measure. But not impossible to feel and see the results of.

> Comparing US wages to countries that have far greater social safety nets and healthcare is impossible.

No, it's not impossible. I'm from the US and live in Canada and it's essentially comparing the lower US tax rate + health care premiums and expected unemployment benefits.

For the record, the US is clearly cheaper for a slim 30 something with no kids and no medical issues -- like ~27,000 bucks or so per year, when I compared WA to AB. When you start adding kids and getting 60+ that changes, and long term it may be a better deal up north, but in the short term I'd rather do STEM in a state with no income tax.

Yes, for high earners in STEM in high demand of their labor it’s a no brainer.

But for others, the volatility of income is much higher and muddies the calculation. Losing your job is much less stressful when you don’t have to worry about your healthcare also.