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Technology Stocks : Semi-Equips - Buy when BLOOD is running in the streets!
LRCX 162.15-1.3%12:38 PM EST
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To: Cary Salsberg who wrote (2859)10/22/1997 5:27:00 AM
From: John Cuthbertson  Read Replies (1) of 10921
 
>The economy is in one of the longer upswings of this century and the market is booming, but most reports of real income show it unchanged for twenty years!

Cary,
Keep in mind that such reports can easily be slanted to make the political point desired by the presenter. The economist Robert Samuelson wrote a good newspaper column on this very point last week, using as an example the statistics on "Median Family Income" from the Census Bureau. This figure does indeed show almost no growth in real terms since the early 1970's. However, upon closer examination, this is entirely due to decreasing median family size over the same period.
If you examine instead the median family income for families of the same size (say families of 4 people), the numbers show quite a bit of increase since the 1970's.* Same thing is true of per capita income. Also, there is the probable overstatement of the inflation rate used in converting nominal to "real" dollars that Clark Hare referred to. The idea that the majority of people in the US are getting poorer (or even just have stagnant real incomes) is, thankfully, just plain wrong.

==John

*though the peak occured for most family sizes about 1989, and hadn't yet climbed back to that level in the latest year's figures. I don't remember the actual numbers, but I might be able to dig up the article if you're interested.
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