Are you better off than you were four years ago? It can be a murky picture for many

I know that, you silly billy. The view is just better from afar

Yeah, I know. It's so diametrically opposed to the narrative that's in the media that people start acting like you're crazy when you talk about it.

This is a chart of the GINI coefficient, one of the best bottom-line metrics for overall "level of inequality" as a single simple number. It's irritating that it cuts off in the middle of the Covid discontinuity, but everything I can find is that it's still at around 40, i.e. still holding steadily at levels that haven't been seen consistently since the late 1990s.

To get a little more into the details instead of just an abstract number:

The IRA and stronger support for unions led to an absolutely historic increase in wages at the bottom end of the scale, comfortably beating inflation and then some. The level of inflation was absolutely historic, and there wasn't an equal income gain at the high end of the scale (e.g. tech jobs); I suspect that most of that manufacturing-worker gain was totally invisible to the average Lemmy user, so all they see is the inflation, so it feels like things are getting worse overall for the economy, but for the actually vulnerable people, it's going in the right direction for the first time in quite a while. Not anywhere near where it should be, of course, but going in the right direction by a pretty significant tick.

• Wages at the 10th percentile (and, for that matter, in the average) are up (12% above inflation for the 10th percentile)
• Wages at the median are steady (big wage gains eaten up by big inflation, no real change in real wages)
• Wages at the top actually are falling (losing ground to inflation that is)

This is one source for all that stuff about wages at different income levels

I know, it's very different from the narrative.