Anyone who believes that is smoking ALL the crack. Below I will explain how you can lie in plain sight and get away with it unless someone has a giant fucking brain like I do.
First, this is based on own earnings, i.e., per individual. The enormous gap between Silent/Greatest gen and everyone else is mostly due to women entering the paid workforce. Half the Silent Gen “median person” was a non-earning or low-earning (almost always a woman) spouse. That means there are a bunch of non-earner zeros on the left side of their medians. That further means that their individual labor earnings crater, necessarily. That’s obviously not because a 1955 machinist was poor, but because the median adult then included millions of women with almost no recorded labor income. So that is just a simple composition effect they are using to lie there.
By the way, I’ve read the papers these charts are poorly cribbed from. One of them says the exact opposite of what’s presented here in fact. Check it yourself. There’s a reason it’s called (in part) “Has Intergenerational Progress Stalled?” Why each generation earns more is largely based on the fact that each generation works more because there are more of the pool in the labor force.
Another major deception here: the inset chart series is post-tax, post-transfer. Thus, it imputes the market value of public health insurance (Medicare/Medicaid) at the cost of providing it. Healthcare costs exploded during the past 50 years. National health expenditures per capita rose ~3.5% per year in real terms. Because those costs are booked as income to the recipient, rising medical prices mechanically show up as you getting “richer.” Which is, you know, fucking ridiculous. But a good way to lie for econs. They do it all the time.
Another one: The big chart uses CPI (in 2019 dollars) while the paper uses PCE. Pew just recently showed real median wage growth since 1999 lands at anywhere from 11% to 22% depending just on which inflation index you choose. Those clowns chose the measure that made their point look the most rosy. Also, of course, during that time, housing and education outran inflation by a lot. A single economy-wide deflator averages a representative consumer’s basket. It is really fucking not the basket of a 26-year-old, which is dominated by rent, first-time home prices, tuition, childcare, and medical, which are the exact categories that rose way out of proportion to general inflation.
And, lastly, Gen Z is the least trustworthy part of that whole set of absurd lies data-wise. More of Gen Z is still in school and for longer, so the ones with recorded earnings at 20–24 are a selected slice of the population. Often, it’s those with parental help, nepo babies, athletes and otherwise-abnormal people that skew the stats a lot.
In other words, these are shoddy lies that nevertheless will hoodwink most. You can fool most of the people most of the time with crap like this, but me nearly none of the time.
Nice try, though. I had to spend three entire minutes thinking about it, which is two more than usual.
