It’s partially that the value of the dollar has been diluted a lot over the decades, and people are in denial about it. Earning 100k is no longer „a good salary“.
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100k is still a good salary. However is used to be a great salary, and most people are not in touch with how inflation has changed the value.
100k is almost double the average. That makes it a great salary even today. We in tech so easily forget how hard life is for the vast majority of workers.
No, it means the average is too low.
Right, we're Americans; the median salary should be "I'm rich", just like all our kids should be above average.
Nobody is in denial about a well known behaviour that happens to every currency
People might not be in denial, but too many are clueless/uninformed about inflation and its effect.
You'd be surprised how economically iterate average people are. I had highschool colleagues who couldn't calculate VAT/sales tax out of a price on the whiteboard.
Sure, people have heard of the word inflation, they know this word exists, but they won't be able to explain how it works and its effects throughout the economy.
If you ask a random person on the street what inflation is (and what it is not) and how a 1950s dollar compares to today and what lifestyle the average single income household affords you then vs now, you’re going to get a wrong answer in both cases.
I mean: If you came up to me and asked about how the value of the dollar and average lifestyles compare between the 1950s and today, I wouldn't be able to answer that either. If you forced an answer on the spot, then I'd have to guess at it -- and that guess would probably be a wrong.
I simply don't know the specifics because that was 70 years ago and I wasn't around back then. I do feel confident that I could eventually produce a good answer (or perhaps even a great answer), but I'd have to do some homework in order to produce that answer.
But without that homework, it's just not something that I can relate to because my present perspective does not include it.
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Meanwhile: If you asked random people on the streets of Anytown, USA about what they feel about price of a Big Mac or rent today compared to 5 years ago, it might be rational to expect to get some pretty direct and sometimes livid responses.
> It’s partially that the value of the dollar has been diluted a lot over the decades, and people are in denial about it. Earning 100k is no longer „a good salary“.
A "good salary" (or at least the median) used to be $5000:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Median_personal_income_af...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
As the 'dollar has lost value' people have demanded more dollars in their salary. (Whether the two have kept up with each other is a matter of debate/concern.)
OK, every time I see a comment about income on the internet, I have to assume that the person commenting has zero IQ if they mention nothing about COL.
The same happens when someone mentions something about the Average income as opposed to the median income. The average income is meaningless if the top 1% keep going up while the rest of the system stays the same. The average would look like people are earning more money when they're not.
Same thing with Market economics and the price of items. If I got a choice to sell a boner pill for $1 to a million people and $1 million to one person, those are equal value propositions. So whenever a corporation raises prices, they don't care how many customers they cut off as long as the remaining ones are whales. That's particularly sharp with all the AI costs being shoved into the pipe.
So, that is to say, you really shouldn't just produce a single number about anything and treat it as some benchmark across the world.
Technically even an income of 50k is really high for a person that just needs to pay property taxes and food (house is paid off for example). And if they live in Missouri, they are probably reaching "upper middle" especially if they already have savings.