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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jfdlsjfd" data-source="post: 9798772" data-attributes="member: 42856">Well, I added the part about income because Umbran specifically called out that wages don't reflect inequalities. They don't, of course, but that wasn't my point. My point was that technological increase did allow overall wage growth, and that in many countries we saw a reduction in wage inequalities over the 20th century, with a more recent stable/slow increase phase.I don't think the median is what should be observed in isolation. For the first part of my point, it doesn't matter if the median wage increased or decreased. A targeted increase in wages, concentrated among, say, the top quartile, can confirm an increase in wages even if the median wage stay unchanged. It's for the second part of the arguments (real wage increased over time) that the median is interesting. And the median real weekly earnings increased by 12% since 1980 : <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q" target="_blank">Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over</a> (the St Louis Fed is saying they used BLS data). So no, most American employees aren't having a harder time to put bread on the table than in 1979.It's probably linked to translation into English.Of course. It obviously goes without saying, and that's why I didn't say it explicitely. I copy/pasted graphs mentionning the sources in the wall of text or on the charts. The St Louis Fed uses BLS data, and other charts come the UK ONS (office for national statistics) and INSEE (institut national de la statistique et des études économiques). I am not expecting people to think I falsified the data to win points on an Internet board (especially when just illustrating common knowledge), so showing the graphs (and their key) felt sufficent at the time, without linking to them. Though I should have noted them, if only for finding again the graph for the Netherlands and specifically data from the Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek.The graph number #1, #3 and #4 are about wages, not income. The only graph showing income was #2, and used to show that redistributive measure can have a significant effect. Ignoring this graph doesn't change the conclusion.Graph #5 was about GDP, because I answered a quote about nominal GDP, which is less useful to the discussion than real GDP, and the next 3 graphs compare the labour share of national income, which is a measurement that's standardized across countries, allowing for easy comparability, showing the trend in increase of the share of wealth going to capital owner, a distinct argument I answered to, and unrelated to the first argument. That's why I used another measurement: because I was answering another claim (this time, mostly to concur).The last two shares answered the part about mitigating inequalities through taxes, to adress specifically the fact that "most of the wealth goes elsewhere". It is, I agree, a reply to a tangential argument which I should have ignored. I edited them out.I should probably have itemized the three distinct claims I addressed.</blockquote>

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