US consumers remain unimpressed with this progress, however, because they remember what they were paying for things pre-pandemic. Used car prices are 34% higher, food prices are 26% higher and rent prices are 22% higher than in January 2020, according to our calculations using PCE data.
While these are some of the more extreme examples of recent price increases, the average basket of goods and services that most Americans buy in any given month is 17% more expensive than four years ago.
The real word distribution of wealth is actually kind of insane.
And that’s forcing people into Quintiles. When you look at the income distribution before the median it becomes very clear it’s not a straight slope or at least not in the good way. This was ten years ago. As you can see the median does not represent the mode. Which is what people think of when you say median.
I’ve never heard of anyone mixing up mode and median, it’s always mean and median.
That’s because most people don’t even know what the mode is. I’ve met a depressing number of people who think Median is the science term for the colloquial definition of Average. When you tell them the Mode is literally the spot with the most data points they then need the actual statistics definitions of Median and Average explained.
In this case everyone argues over median and average, not even realizing the mode clearly shows an entire section of our country is hurting really bad.