The numbers are pretty clear. The top 20%, which roughly correlates to the college-educated professionally-employed class, has seen their real income and social welfare steadily go up for the last half century. The bottom 80% has seen stagnation and decline, as well as increased social ills like drug addiction, broken homes, and so forth. Notably, this pattern exists even if you look at just white people, so a racial explanation won’t do.
Yup. Real median personal income in the US is up. [0] Although there have been few gains in the past decade. It's a pretty decent measure of the average American.
It's also a bit better than wages as a measure of average citizen's purchasing power. After all, wages are linked to having a job. The 20th century saw substantial emancipation and the end of high degrees of exclusion of minorities, particularly women. As they entered the workforce, real wages may have decreased slightly on average, i.e. men were earning slightly less per job, and women were earning significantly more, which is why you can see average wages decline while average personal income increases.
