Living standards are not down over ten years. Statistically and, for me, anecdotally. I’m making no comparison over lifetimes because we haven’t been collecting e.g. real median household income over that stretch.
Fortunately, it’s beside the point. You alleged “wages start[ed] to tick up then all of the sudden” rates were raised. That’s demonstrably untrue. Wages were rising for a decade, including precipitously through the pandemic, before we did anything about it.
Go around at talk to some of the young people you know, are they willing to trade a few years at the end of their life and their iPhone to get out of student debt and own a home?
This is incorrect.
> talk to some of the young people you know
We’re paying down our debt and buying homes. We’re more stretched than our grandparents were at our age, but our objective quality of life is far superior. I wouldn’t give up modern telecommunications for a bigger house.
I own assets and am happy. (The home owning is often a source of stress that competes with my happiness.) The last ten years saw my prospects increase materially. I’ve also noticed as much in my friends with more blue-collar jobs. Statistics show a similar trend: broad gains with pockets of instability.
CPI speaks to price levels. It says nothing about standards of living, just cost. Nobody argues that if you were on the winning team, life in the 50s wasn’t great. Naturally, if you poll folks from different backgrounds, that rose tint fades a bit. Unfortunately, we don’t have fine-grained economic statistics from the 50s to today.