/American-Real-Wages

Calculating American's median real wages over time

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American-Real-Wages

U.S.A. median wages over time normalized to ounces of gold

Real wages in terms of ounces of gold over time

Data sources

Gold/USD price data for 1950-2017 was sourced from datahub.io. Gold/USD price data for 2018-2023 was sourced from goldprice.org. I also crosschecked the price history against data from macrotrends.net to ensure it was broadly accurate.

The median wage data came from the St. Louis Federal Reserve: Employed full time: Median usual weekly nominal earnings (second quartile): Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over

Rationale for using gold to normalize nominal -> real wages

I'm not a goldbug bug I think that gold is a reasonable proxy for real wages. Gold is unambiguous (it's an element on the periodic table), it has good price data available, and the ratio of gold to the price of other goods and services stays relatively stable over time.