This thought occurred to me too, but then I realized even 37% is very high. In a reasonable society, most individuals' earnings should go up all the time. The downward pressure that should exist is high earners retiring and low earners just starting their career. A mildly idealized society should probably have 3% go from unemployed to employed, 3% go from employed to (voluntarily) unemployed, and the remaining 94% increase their earnings.

Its interesting, I thought it was pretty well established that COVID era stimulus helped lower earners make real gains, even adjusted for inflation, while higher earners who did not get stimulus checks lost ground?

From page 36 of the paper: All deciles during this earlier period experienced annual real wage growth, with the growth being the largest for the bottom two deciles of the wage distribution.

I don't think the "average" is a good metric for the social impact of this. Everyone (or almost everyone) being at a standstill would be the minimum that governments should worry about. When even a sizable minority loses ground, that could create unrest.

That's indicative of a growing economic inequality though, which in any orthodox economic book is bad

I'm not sure averages are that interesting, because the people at the high end have an extra-ordinary amount of influence on the average. You might want to look at the shape of the distribution?

The median worker saw a small wage growth, on the scale of ~.5% a year.

However, it does says that 58% of all workers failed to keep up with the real wage growth trend we saw in the years leading up to the pandemic.

>So 63% didn't.

But more than a third of Americans did. You can't "glass two-thirds full" tens of millions of people seeing their actual purchasing power decrease.

What does that have to do with anything?

Anything below 100% seems like a potential warning sign in a growing economy.

Time frame is '21-'24 (Biden term) and from U Chicago. Pretty sure this is right-wing propaganda.

Mine increased 2.75x. If you count bonuses and other benefits it definitely increased more than 3x.