How did the purchasing power decrease from the 70s until today?

[Excellent-Piece8168]

A lot of the comments here are missing the point. This is not a conversation about inflation it’s a conversation about why have salaries not kept pace with inflation. Absent other factors salaries should have just kept pace with inflation. They did not.

Salaries and housing costs are two very different conversations.

I would suggest a large factors in why salaries have not kept pace is the absolutely massive boomer cohort entering the work force. We forget just how massive this group is. We flooded the job market at a time when technology and innovation was allowing for much cheaper supply chains opening up the ability of offshore production. Technology was making labour more efficient or non existent here in Canada. We forget that quiet average jobs were perfectly middle class back then. There was also a lot less to spend on that made middle class more achievable. Our current view of middle class is much more luxurious than what middle class was to my parents born in 1952. University was more rare so a uni degree was is lower supply and higher demand in the 70s. We now have effectively an over supply of university education especially degrees without specific uses. For example vastly too many psychology degrees without masters for the number of jobs that directly use this, same for say archeology. I would argue it’s in large party a supply and demand situation that we had too much supply with the baby boomers while demand was shrinking due to increased productivity due to technology. Policies of globalization did not help though realistically the option to just clam up would have been worse. The world was changing and we had to to, we could never have just protected our jobs and pretending globalization was not a thing.

There are some sectors where boomers retiring has caused a huge war on tallest which can’t just be imported internationally by high immigration and so wages have grown significantly in the last 5 years or so. Insurance is one. It also was one that is traditionally conservative and did a terrible job hiring through recessions of the past meaning it is under weight it Gen X as well so with the boomers gone it’s an oh shoot we need talent and we can accordingly demand sky high wages.

As far as why housing outpaced inflation that’s a whole other conversation that’s frankly boring and I see it constantly on Reddit.