Productivity has risen in manufacturing, tech, and automation. This provides a moderate wage increase in those jobs, but a sharp drop in employment as well. Meanwhile, you also get a similar competitive wage increase in essential service industries (health care, education, construction), but because those sectors have experienced no increase in productivity, this is reflected in the price others pay for those goods, not in the employment figures for them. The drop in employment in high-productivity sectors then forces laid off workers into marginal service-sector employment.
Because of Simpson's Paradox [1], this results in flat or declining wage statistics across the whole economy, but the statistics obscure a lot of detail. Nurses, therapists, teachers, et al are doing okay; they're not going to get rich, and the rising cost of housing in some metro areas means that if they don't already own their house they may need to move far away, but their relative wages are keeping pace. Same with the few remaining union jobs: unionized longshoremen at the Port of Oakland make mid six-figures, as much as a software engineer at a startup. But employment in those fields is dropping, because of productivity increases, and everyone who is displaced out of them needs to find employment in the undifferentiated service sector, usually at much lower wages. And the people who actually provide the automation support that's driving this productivity growth are making out like bandits: that's where you see all the new millionaires being minted.
This'll continue until either society breaks down and goes to war or a bunch of new industries spring up and absorb all the new workers, who then differentiate their skillsets and bargain for higher pay. Both of these happened last time this occurred, in the early 1900s; the world wars were the springboard that drove adoption of new technologies like automobiles and airplanes. We see some possible beginnings of this with things like ridesharing and delivery startups, but it seems unlikely these are the big industries of the 21st century. More likely, they're transient uses for large crowds of unemployed people, and the real 21st century industries will be the micromarket: individual entrepreneurs that are each specialized in reaching & designing for a small group of customers, using home manufacturing & automated shipping tools that are in their infancy now.
Not so for rent, food etc. as far as I know.
Purchasing power for subsistence goods would't go up due to the malthusian trap.
The same way you have induced demand from wider roads to have more cars.
Mass-produced electronics and other consumer goods is much, much cheaper; you get more of that with your wages.
https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/blogs/lookout/fed-officia...
As far as I can know, food prices in America have gone down a little bit in the long term in comparison to general price index; 1982 food price index was 100 and now it is 90. Where I live (north Europe), the price drop has been more substantial.
The biggest health problem that poor people face in the U.S. is obesity.
But even if food is not problem, the real issues are housing and health care costs.
As our purchasing power has decreased and inflation has increased, we've also invented a lot more expensive stuff to spend our fewer and fewer dollars on.
As said, real estate prices have gone up. But in early 1970's, Americans used 20 % of their inćome on food. Now it's somewhere around 6-7 %. So, for this most basic of commodities, the purchasing power has increased substantially.
It is remarkable how the prices of maybe three out of four items has doubled in the last four years.
Maybe the market has simply bifurcated.
