Question about real wages of different income percentiles.
Does anyone know or better yet have resources on how the real wages (wages adjusted for inflation and buying power) have evolved for different percentiles of the national income share of Germany or the USA? As I understand it real wages are calculated from the income of an average citizien. This ignores outliers like people who's total incomes increased a lot and thus can average out many people who's total income decreased only a little.
2 replies
US official data is here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=bls%3Bwages
Those are in 1982-84 dollar amounts.
No idea about German data.
For wages/income/wealth data you usually want to look at the median values, not average. Average gets way skewed by the super rich, so the average value is typically far from the common person. Median shows what the common person earns.
I learned some new terms from that site so thanks. It allowed me to find this which has US data for the real income growth of different wage groups. https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2026-05/growth-incidence-curves.pdf