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The issue is the ratio. A medium salary could get you a medium priced house 60 years ago. This is no longer the case, not even close.
Nobody cares what the actual number is. As long as median matches median, and spending power stays where it was in the 60s (or ideally improves, though that dream is dead), then that's good.
Wage growth stopped happening for the past half century. This isn't good. Capitalists have been hoarding metric fuckloads of wealth, and it hasn't trickled down (nobody in their right mind ever thought it would, but we now live in the world that conservatives 50 years ago wanted, and it's failing miserably).
Your data is out of date. Wage growth very healthy under Biden even accounting for inflation.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/the-purchasing-power-of-american-households
There were plenty of other periods where wage growth outpaced prices over a 2-6 year span. The issue is there are also periods where prices outpace wages over similar spans.
What you end up with is 60 years of no wage growth. Biden didn't magically fix this. If he somehow fixed boom bust cycles and set forth unprecedented policies that will fix fundamental flaws in capitalism, fantastic (hint: he didn't). In reality, crises of overproduction still occur. We still need standard government intervention to stimulate the economy, e.g aggregate spending and interest rate changes.
Except that's also wrong
There was a very short-lived peak one year in the 1973, but we've had consistent wage growth since 1990
Yeah, 1970s and 1980s sucked, but we're at all time highs now. Honestly, that's ancient history, for all of my life the line has been going up
Your best evidence for wage growth over the last 60 years is a graph showing that in terms of real spending power there was literally no gain between 1973 and 2019?
Productivity skyrocketed in that time, and so has real wealth for people in the top 5%. That hasn't been the case for workers, by your own cherry-picked statistics there were literally 0 gains made in 46 years.
Yes, but it's not like the stock market. In Japan the stock market peaked in 1989. If you invested all your money at that time you would have broken even after dividends now, maybe.
A peak in compensation doesn't work like that, since you couldn't "invest" in 1973 and "lose money".
It's more like from the 1964 to 1994 you have a flat graph with a peak, but from 1994 to the present it's been getting better for the last 30 years.
Productivity is another thing, for one, medical insurance costs employers a lot more and it's not included in wages, but included in total compensation
You're trying to ignore the peak by choosing arbitrary time periods and pretending like they happened in the past so we can ignore them. Like somehow going from 1994 -> 2024 is valid, but going from 1973 -> 2019 is invalid because it's in an arbitrarily different slot.
It's not arbitrary to use the peak and compare that to modern data. The reason being it allows the assessment of what real spending power the median worker had at their best in the last 60 years, and highlights how that wage growth was taken away to such an extent that it took half a century of scraps just to get back to the same spot.
It's not like something physically happened in the world that reduced total access to capital or wealth and it took society 60 years to rebuild, it's just the contradictions of capitalism taking real aggregate spending ability away from workers to massively inflate profits, as the data you've provided showcases so clearly.
The opposite happened, Japan started producing more goods in the 70s and women entered the workforce in the 80s.
1973 was just peak male American worker
That data doesn't exclude people based on sex, there are women in my family that had jobs in 1973. They were included in the data you sent.
Japan didn't destroy the global economy to such an extent that it took 60 years to recover. Neither did an increase in the number of women working. But even if we took your fantasy views as undeniable fact, it's still absolutely ridiculous that having more goods and more workers in a capitalist system would destroy the American economy to such an extent that it took literally half a century to recover.
In reality, it was simply heightened profit extraction. Stock buybacks were brought back, taxes were lowered for the wealthy and corporations, and so these companies had massively increased access to capital, and could use said capital to artificially inflate the value of their own stock instead of investing in the company (e.g via jobs, desaturating the labor market and increasing the value of labor).
You seem to think workers got shafted because something bad happened to the world economy. It's the opposite, rising Asian economies pulled billions of people out of poverty and they competed with the American worker. It's because the world economies caught up that the average worker had to get more education to keep up
Did you read my message? I literally said workers got shafted despite nothing bad happening to the world. That's precisely the problem.
It's fine for the economy to decline in response to negative material realities, e.g a hurricane wiping out a city, the local economy being a reflection of that physical tragedy makes sense, in some regard.
The problem is we took half a century to recover from literally nothing devastating on a materialist level, it was specifically regulations being laxed and allowing the natural tendencies of capitalism to flourish. This was always the goal of capitalists, they just emitted enough propaganda and exerted enough influence to finally get what they want. Having a class constantly trying to extract as much from workers as possible, and literally succeeding for so long, is a problem that needs to be solved. That class needs to be eradicated.