The numbers I&#x27;ve seen are adjusted for inflation and show that <i>real</i> wages have been largely stagnant since the early 70s. There have been periods of modest gain, usually when the economy is absolutely roaring like the late 90s, but the general trend has been flat to downward. The lower you are on the totem pole the worse it&#x27;s been: the upper middle has seen some gain, the middle none, and the lower middle has lost ground.<p>I&#x27;m also not sure that I fully believe the inflation numbers. It&#x27;s not necessarily that I think they&#x27;re fraudulent, but I don&#x27;t think the methodology for calculating inflation has caught up with reality. The models I&#x27;ve seen assume inflation to be consistent across the economy, which may have been largely true in the 20th century but is true no longer.<p>The problem is that inflation since the early 2000s has been extremely uneven. We&#x27;ve had massive deflation in some areas, like manufactured goods. But necessities -- especially real estate, health care, and college tuition -- have almost hyper-inflated.<p>You can go without gadgets and toys but not without food and a place to live. We&#x27;ve had near-hyperinflation in necessities but it doesn&#x27;t show in the stats because the stats average those numbers in with the deflationary numbers you get if you look at TV sets, appliances, and computers.<p>Real estate is utterly insane. I cannot even comprehend how it can possibly be so high. How can you have a market for real estate at these prices? Who&#x27;s buying it and what parallel universe of limitless wealth do they come from?<p>I&#x27;m not talking about areas like the Bay Area, which has peculiar circumstances at work, or always-hot areas like Manhattan. There will always be &quot;bubbles&quot; of high prices vs. the rest of the market. If you look across the average of the market, real estate is crazy when compared to wages. I suppose it may be a function of historically cheap money causing larger home loans and jacking up prices, but it&#x27;s essentially locked anyone out who isn&#x27;t rich or willing to sign up for a crazy mortgage.