• lordnikon@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    What I find interesting is they never adjust for inflation wages. Like if you were making $60k a year in 1885. What would that be in today’s money? That would be $178k. Or 118k for 40k in 1985. My question to everyone. are you making the 2025 values?

    • doingthestuff@lemy.lol
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      2 days ago

      Not a lot of people were making $60k in 1985. And yes, wages today have absolutely fallen behind. I’m not even making $60k now.

      • lordnikon@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Very true random selection of a secretary for a woman in 1985 would have been 16k and would translate to 47k in 2025. My point being when they show how expensive stuff was they never show what wages would be if adjusted. Not the person on this thread but when journalists do it they never want to show that value to show how screwed some people are. As they see they are still making the 1985 wage in the year 2025.

    • jacksilver@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Your comment through me for a loop, initially I was thinking that due to changing baskets for calculating CPI/inflation that would account for wages, but that’s really just cost for basic goods shifting. So I looked it up and found out there is the ECI (Employment Cost Index) which is tracking “inflation” for labor.

      This site has the chart of CPI vs ECI and, not too surprisingly, they move mostly in unison. The chart does diverge from what I would expect (costs out pacing wages), but haven’t had enough time to read into it.

      https://www.bls.gov/blog/2023/more-ways-to-look-at-wages-and-inflation.htm

      • lordnikon@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Yeah this goes back to 2005 and you see the devergince in 2008 if you go back to 1970 you will see a bigger devergince.