Pete Woods, local man of obviousness: Gonna preface my statement by saying EVERYONE is getting robbed & the fact people earn less in adjusted dollars is criminal & you should be angry. All I want to add to the conversation is that comic freelancers haven’t seen any raises since the early 2000s. Not adjusted dollars. Actual dollars.

Gonna preface my statement by saying EVERYONE is getting robbed & the fact people earn less in adjusted dollars is criminal & you should be angry. All I want to add to the conversation is that comic freelancers haven’t seen any raises since the early 2000s. Not adjusted dollars. Actual dollars.

My page rate for pencils and inks in 2024 is the same I made in 2006 on Superman.

The best advice my econ professor ever gave me was ask for a raise for the exact percentage that inflation rises every single year. Our entire class laughed at that but it's true.

It's worse than that. If "keep up with inflation" is your starting negotiation, and you accept any compromise one year, then you are getting an effective pay cut for rest of your employment. The following year you have to have an above inflation rise just to get back to zero.

So many creative fields are making outright less in non-adjusted dollars. It's baffling, especially with so many more responsibilities. Like you used to be able to earn a healthy living as just a video editor, but now you need graphic design, 3d anim, motion graphics, etc. to earn $35 for prev $65k.

Sadly true

You know the odd thing is you can live comfortably on 35k a year still... But it's a matter of where. And for how much longer. Because even places where that is possible or reasonable are beginning to price people out of homes right now.

not *everyone* is getting robbed We have money that is going into the hands of people who normally didn't have that much spending power, and the challenge is keeping prices down without doing something like rationing.

Low-wage workers have seen historically fast real wage growth in the pandemic business cycle: Policy investments translate into better opportunities for the lowest-paid workerswww.epi.org What this report finds: Between 2019 and 2022, low-wage workers experienced historically fast real wage growth. The 10th percentile real hourly wage grew 9.0% over the three-year period. This tremendo...

Hey that’s good news. I hadn’t heard this. Thanks for sharing.

It makes me want to scream.

As a freelance journalist I struggle to maintain the word rate I got for my first story in 1996.

US inflation adjusted household income over time:

Not that it's likely a huge change, but using median household is kind of weird, since you need to account for changes in the household size and number of earners.

Here's the personal income chart for comparison from the same site

I’m curious if there’s a Spiders Georg situation going on here. I can’t tell if this is workers or if the billionaires are skewing the numbers. I’ll have to look. I read recently that 3 millennial billionaires control something like 4% of the entirety of millennial wealth which is mind boggling.

It's median, not mean, so that shouldn't matter. Quartile data might be more interesting though.

This is why I think showing a median is important here. A median strips out the richest & poorest 50% of the population, so it's the closest to asking "how is a typical person doing." Not perfect obviously, no single # is.

I need to read more closely!

Good point! As household size has gotten smaller this likely slightly underestimates increases in income.

In a fair world I shouldn't give excuses for raising my rates, say, 20% of what they were ten years ago given how things have changed. But alas that's not where we are. 🥲

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