Cafe Hayek rightly takes an AP reporter to task for not questioning a recent study that found “Rich-Poor Income Gap Growing“. So while it sounds that inflation adjusted wages increased across the board, ie the income distribution (if you can think of it as a bell-shaped normal distribution) moved to the right. Which is good, people overall are wealthier. But it seems the study focused on the range between the highest and the lowest, which is less meaningful. It only tell you that your distribution got wider, not much more than that and certainly very little about overall wealth in your population.
This is fake analysis. It’s comparing two snapshots over time and
pretending that the people in the snapshots are the same people. The
implication is that if you were a poor family in 1980, you barely got
ahead while the rich families, turbo-charged ahead of everyone else and
left them in the dust.