Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet wages generally do rise against inflation, otherwise we'd be as poor as we were in 1600, so this "by design" must not be true...... https://www.visualizingeconomics.com/blog/2008/05/04/average...
I would estimate in 1600 there were trades like bricklayers or wheelwrights who earned multiples of the average income, but comparable work today, even with overtime, is average or less. It didn't get that way overnight, one generation gives way to another, as in the graph. For example there were far different people enjoying the peaks to the right of Bill Clinton than there were suffering the downturns beforehand, w…
You realize that was completely a terrible idea, that the US tried to force (tying them together), and the screw market pressures nearly resulted in the USD equivalent of the sterling crisis in the UK? There was nothing stable about it - it was a sham to keep goldbugs from losing their minds, nothing more. There was never enough silver to keep those prices, and lots of people around the world knew it, and were running arbitrage games on the US, extracting money from us. Trying to fix a currency so tightly to the amount of metal one can find is a terrible way to run an economy, which is why not a single country out of over 200 still does it.
If you think somehow silver or gold is stable, and the US dollar is not, take some goods like rent or food and price them in USD since the US dropped the fake game. You'll find that metals are vastly more volatile than USD (which is why the USD is valued the world over as both reserve currency and a currency to use for stability).
>average person (not the average income) was too devastated
The median wages tell the same story (below). Wages increased for individuals, for tax units, for households.
>is not a very accurate indicator of how the income of the non-exceptional population
Did you bother to look that up? It's simply untrue (I posted a few more series before since the word "average," which can mean median or mean (or many other averages) is not clear enough for you.
Do you understand carefully the difference between mean and median?
>And in terms of "per Tax Unit", the left 2/3 of the graph is with one earner, but after that it's two different breadwinners for the most part.
Did you check this or simply "feel" it's true? A tax unit is a single person or a married couple. There are now more single led households and far fewer married people than in the left 2/3 of the graph, and a significant amount of the left part of the graph had a lot of women in the labor force.
So your claim fails on pretty much every trend. All your factors trend down over that graph, yet incomes trend up. Don't like that one, here's real median person income, up from 26k in 1975 to 38k now [1]. Here's real median household income [2].