How do you reply to someone that says comparing today’s wages of the past is like comparing apples and oranges. Here are the 4 main arguments I see but am not sure how to respond:
1. Comparing COL today with earlier in the 20th century is cherry picking benefits and downsides since life expectancy was much lower in the recent past.
2. If people live in smaller cities/towns as they did 50/70 years ago then cost of living is lower.
3. The wages of the 50’s-70’s in the US were inflated relative to the world since we did not have the damage to infrastructure that other countries did so we had a relative increase in wealth and ability that has since been more evenly distributed across the world.
4. Population is much higher in the US so obviously things would be more expensive than they were when there was less demand. Same is true in other countries with higher population density…increased housing costs due to limited resources (alleviated by point 2 to some extent)
Obviously large businesses where owners/managers are far removed from employees has changed quite a bit over the years and this has a negative impact on workers.