What gives? How can the median income shoot up in every demographic sector while the overall median remains nearly unchanged?
…
I lifted these numbers from Edward Conard’s new book Unintended
Consequences”
********************************

This is good. I also recommend John Paulos’ “A mathematician
reads the newspaper”, full of similar anecdotes.

I saw another example recently. Some brainiac commented
that, while low interest rates have saved mortgage and consumer
service costs $200 billion, interest income is down $400
billion. (no source given)

huh? Isn’t finance zero sum, one man’s payment is
another’s receipt?

What are people thinking, when they say things like that?

Liberals always want us to picture a static economy, where Person A starts at income level 1 and can never escape it. That’s probably the exception, not the rule. A “Median” income level is meaningless if the values are skewed to far in either direction.

Paul, what I think has been happening – and it’s been a gradual change since the 1940s – is that women are no longer working as housewives. The work of housewives is unpaid, and thus not included in income and wage statistics. That unpaid, uncounted work has now moved into the paid sector. That would include:

day care
food preparation
housecleaning (for some households)
lawn care

As these low-skilled tasks began to be included in income statistics, median wages and median income should have declined – if all else had remained the same.

A proper comparison between decades would have included the income of housewives ($0) in deriving the median statistics.

?
If women have been dropping the bridge club,
in order to enter the work force, we have a
massive DECREASE in leisure time.

This brings to mind something I read – can’t
recall where – the commentator pointed out that
longer work hours – commonly assumed to represent
prosperity – are not an unalloyed blessing, as
there’s a cost in the loss of leisure time.

And, some years ago, another economist examined
this supposed gain. He assumed $30/hr, standard
work week, then did some estimates of the costs of
transportation, wardrobe, child care, taxes, etc.,
and figured a woman is netting $8/hr. This sugests
irrationality on a large scale, which should be of
interest to econmists.

Do you mean that full time workers are working less than they did in the 1970s? Or that more Americans are working parttime?

I don’t have access to the paper, but Debbie Baritz reports on an NBER paper

“In the paper by Orazio Attanasio, Erik Hurst and Luigi Pistaferri called, “The Evolution of Income, Consumption, and Leisure Inequality in The US, 1980-2010,” evidence showed that the higher-educated (and yes higher-earning) Americans spend more time working but less time on leisure activities than the poorer income groups, according to The Wall Street Journal.”

Did the productivity of the median worker increase 50%? I doubt that. The productivity of the entire workforce may have increased 50%. But the technological advances of the past 30 years no doubt helped the highly skilled workers – the minority – much more than the more numerous lower skilled workers. For example, the productivity of my wife and the surgeons she works with increased tremendously since 1980 through the development of minimally invasive surgical techniques. But the productivity of the kitchen staff at her hospital probably changed very little.

Another point about productivity: why should we expect the gains from productivity to necessarily flow to labor? Fred Smith and other stockholders provided complex computerized sorting machinery to the FedEx hub in Memphis in the 1980s and 1990s. Should the benefits of the increased productivity at that hub flow to the unskilled workers at that hub? Or to the engineers who designed and maintained the system? Or to the providers of the capital?