I just looked at graphics, but that's comparing minimum wage against various goods, isn't it? So it would be interesting to see the comparison between median wage and rent, etc. From the data, however, it looks like income inequality expanded quite a bit.

The second infographic compares rent.

But that's still comparing minimum wage rather than median wage, like the parent poster was talking about.

worthless graph because it compares minimum wage to the price of goods, not median wage. The minimum wage today is $7.25 but essentially no one makes that. Target, Chipotle, Amazon, and other start out at $15, others aren't far behind.

You're wrong. Sorry, you don't get to handwave away the many places that are paying $9 an hour and were paying $7.25 last year. Some are still trying to around here.

You can look at the BLS stats. Less than 0.2% of the workforce is making minimum wage.

Half the reason why minimum wages don't work: If they are too low they do nothing.

The other half is that if they are too high they don't create jobs that pay minimum wage. You can't legislate private jobs into existence.

The point of the minimum wage is not to create jobs, it is to ensure that jobs that exist already pay a certain minimum.

The more coherent argument against the minimum wage is that it destroys jobs which cannot be profitable for the employer at the higher wage. The problem with this argument is that the preponderance of research indicates a small magnitude for the elasticity of minimum-wage employment with respect to the minimum wage, generally around -0.05. If a 50% increase in minimum wage results in a 2.5% increase in unemployment in the cohort of people earning near the minimum, and if your aim is to increase the average wage for that cohort, then minimum wage increases do work. The idea that they don't is based on non-quantitative reasoning about the rightness of interfering with markets, or the virtue of work, or a value judgment about a small amount of unemployment outweighing an overall increase in compensation, etc.

I've elided a bunch of detail here, in particular the distinction between minimum-wage elasticity and own-wage elasticity, but this is a good starter:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/impacts-of-minimu...

So in this hypothetical what happens to the 2.5% that lost their jobs? It seems to me that in an attempt to raise the average wage we’re reducing the cohort and removing those with little to no skills and putting them on the gov dole to make statistics happy.

A better comparison would be the price per square foot. The median rent today buys a MUCH larger (and nicer) house than it did in 1968. The average house in the US has increased by 1,000 square feet in the last 50 years. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s...

It's a comparison, but I wouldn't say a better one. You can't just rent a fraction of a property without sharing it with someone else, so the comparison is "What does it cost to get a place of your own in 1968 vs today?" and the answer is you either rent today's bigger but more expensive property, or don't - even if you could afford a 1968 property today.

As Adam Smith observed, when people get more income it almost always goes to better places to live. Better can be more space, better location, or more luxury in the space.

You can still find apartments built in the 1950s that are functional (places where the maintenance was done so they are essentially just as good as 70 years ago) and the rent is cheap. Most people want better.

The more interesting information on that page to me is that the living space per capita has increased. I was suspect that while square footage may be increasing, that could easily be offset by the number of people living in those houses but that doesn't seem to be the case.

The key information missing here though is a more generalized cost of living space per person, beyond housing. This data can still be biased, in general, because it may be the case that fewer people own homes, say more successful wealthy people, while the majority are renting these properties. I have a bucket of anecdotal examples of friends who still don't own homes in their 30s and are still renting.

This data would exclude all of those people painting a picture that people are doing well while some unknown population is renting, paying more per square foot than owning, and rates could be increasing per person per square foot over time. That population could be smaller or larger than those who own homes. I'd be interested to see those distributions of renting/owning and a similar cost comparison for renter square foot costs per capita.

Most renters are not renting "New US homes" and rent does not buy a house. It's a pretty poor comparison.

If a young millennial cannot afford a small apartment, it's a poor consolation that house sizes have grown.