(I accidentally posted this first in another thread. I’ve deleted the name of an other-thread poster.)
Add A939RX0Q048SBEA (Real GDP per capita) to that graph and your conclusion may be less sanguine. Yes, median income is up 21.5% over the 33-year period, but per capita GDP is up 73% over the same period. Workers are getting a much smaller piece of the pie.
‘So what?’, you say? ‘Their income is up, let them [del]eat cake[/del] talk on Androids if they can’t afford iPhones.’? But this ignores at least three points.
(a) Your data series is for household income. More households are now two-worker compared with 1984, perhaps.
(b) American life has become more stressful. Spouse needs to work, labor unions have been destroyed, expenses like smartphones are increasingly necessary; savings like home-cooked meals are harder to achieve.
(c) It’s human nature that one’s sense of economic well-being is gauged relative to one’s neighbors or fellow citizens.
So: Contrary to that misleading graph of median household income, there is massive on-going transfer of wealth and income from average Americans to the very rich. That is a fact.
On another matter, some Dopers are pointing to the "paper" nature of huge fortunes as a Gotcha. Yes, that paper may complicate the matter, but Bezos really is super-rich (:smack:) and some of that paper can be and has been traded (via middlemen) for Lamborghinis. Do those Dopers think the Lamborghinis are made out of paper?