The problem is that it's hard to find data in a consistent format.
That is, I want it adjusted for inflation, plus broken down by percentile (wage of lowest 10%, 20%, median, upper 20%, 10%, etc)...
I found the median hourly wage today, but then could only find median annual wages in 1954.
Like... If that's how much they made in a year, did that include overtime? Is converting that to hourly enough to allow an apples to apples comparison or is it apples to oranges?
I wish they'd be consistent.
Anyways, this 2018 Pew Research seems the closest to what I was looking for,except it's looking at average wages instead of median.
If you don't know, averages can be skewed by really high or low numbers. So if people in the top 1% make a lot of money, the average will be higher... But you may still have a lot of people at the lower income levels who aren't any better off... Or may even be worse off.
Median is somewhat better in this case, because it means half the people make more and half make less.
If the median point today is $19.33/hr, half of people today make more than that... And half make less.
That seems to be about $2/hr in 1954 dollars... So what was the median wage in 1954?
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