Just before the new year began, Doug Short posted his monthly take on both nominal and inflation-adjusted median household income. The November number is the best since the Great Recession began but still falls short of where it was in January 2008 and the peak in January 2002.
Short takes the statistics he uses to create his graphs from Sentier Research, which gets its raw data from the Census.
Median household income—which, it should be noted, is not the same as wages since it includes all income in a household—reached $56,746 in November. That meant a nominal rise of $75 over October and a year-over-year increase of $2,812. When adjusted for inflation, median income was up $58 over October and $2,574 year-over-year. That means that real (inflation-adjusted) median income in November is still 1.8 percent below where it was in January 2008.
When the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its monthly jobs report Friday morning, we’ll see if wages have made an appreciable gain, which, obviously, would boost the median household income Sentier reports later this month.
While the real median is almost back to where it was eight years ago, the economic recovery that officially began in June 2009, has been horribly slow. Just one more gauge of how the middle class has been losing ground economically. Since 1970, the middle class has gone from a 62 percent share of the nation’s income to just 43 percent. Meanwhile, the upper class has risen from a 29 percent share to a 49 percent share. The lower class has slipped from a 10 percent share to a 9 percent share.
One of the key reasons for this, as noted by the Economic Policy Institute in the chart below is that rank-and-file Americans are no longer being fairly compensated for gains in productivity:
There is more to inequality, of course, than income. As Tami Luhby reported a month ago:
The median net worth of upper class families doubled between 1983 and 2013, up to $650,100.
But the wealth of the middle class has increased a near negligible 2% over that time to $98,100. At least they fared better than lower-income Americans, who saw their wealth drop 18% to $9,500.