On the Purposely Misleading Super-Optimism of Historical Myopia

A short while ago, I came across this meme on Facebook from HumanProgress.org (I have reproduced it with its text below):

“A worker on the average wage had to work 508 hours to buy a 15" color TV in 1954. In 2014, he needed to work only 7.8 hours to buy a 50" high-definition TV, a far better product. That’s a price reduction of 98.5%. Explore other price changes over time: https://buff.ly/2Idhu6t”

It got my skeptic-sense tingling because something about those numbers just felt off. So, after some furious casual research and just a few minutes scouring the internet, my suspicions were confirmed.

First of all, this graphic needs some serious fixin’! Its data looks more cherry-picked than… a bunch of cherry trees after a selective harvest. So, let’s go through some of the problematic data:

In adjusted USD, median hourly wages (a much less inaccurate approximation of how the majority of Americans are doing economically) in 1954 were about $13.00, while in 2014, they were about $17.00. Of course, this isn’t the only apples-to-oranges moment of this meme (to extend the fruit metaphor). That 15" RCA Color TV was a big-ticket, luxury item at the time (priced equivalent to nearly $8,000 in today’s USD). You’d have to compare it to something that’s similar: a top-of-the-line television. And that’s very different: an expensive 4K set in 2014 would cost about the same!

Likewise, that random, no-name $218 “HDTV” in the picture would be on the lower end of even 2014’s TV price spectrum. In 1954, one of the more affordable, brand new TV sets was also an RCA model, at $189.95 (equivalent to about $1,700 2014 USD); the black-and-white set also had a larger screen, at 17".

So let’s make those numbers a bit more accurate (i.e. honest), shall we?

Hours needed to buy a top-of-the-line TV in 1954: 615 hours

Hours needed to buy a top-of-the-line TV in 2014: 471 hours

Reduction: 23.4%

Using this new ratio, we can see that in the span of sixty years (from 1954 to 2014), most Americans got a measly $4/hr raise (about $640/mo, or $7,680/yr). This amount is paltry considering that the U.S. economy grew by at least 397% through the same time span. And guess who got paid between 100 and 350 TIMES what most workers got paid between then and now? NOT the majority of Americans, that’s for sure. Not by a long shot. One has to question if memes such as these are meant to purposely mislead the public.

Nowadays, it’s common for people to whine about how the government “steals” their wages through taxation. However, it’s corporate executives and investors who ultimately choose where wages are set (it’s not some invisible hand of an ultimately benevolent “Market”, unfortunately, as much as we’d like to believe in fairy tales). Many of these individuals have been robbing Americans’ hard-earned wages from right under their noses for more than half a century. But, I guess they really need that $768,000 to $2,688,000 per year more than you do.

Yeah, I guess in many ways, that’s one small measure of progress for the Middle Class in America. However, can we truly call it Progress?

Sources:

BLS
https://www.wired.com/2008/03/dayintech-0325/
https://www.reference.com/technology/much-did-television-cost-1950s-9dcede5123bfef9
https://reviews.lcdtvbuyingguide.com/samsung-lcd-tv/samsung-un78hu9000.html
http://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/
https://medianism.org/2015/06/20/is-your-family-earning-twice-as-much-as-your-parents-were-40-years-ago-in-real-dollars-you-should-be/
http://fortune.com/2015/06/22/ceo-vs-worker-pay/)