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Real Median Household Income decreased 1% from 2019 ($81,210) to 2023 ($80,610). It's increased since 2020, sure... but there was a pretty steep drop that it's only now recovering from.
I'm having a surprisingly hard time finding Mean Household Income. Median can be a misleading measure, since it's the mid-point. The bottom of the distribution is essentially fixed at $0, but the top end is hypothetically unlimited.
Basically, if 90% of US household income stays flat, but the billionaires get far more billionairy, the median will increase. That doesn't mean that actual average people have seen their incomes keep pace with the cost of utilities or goods.
The reddened sentence seems wrong to me. Are you sure you're not interchanging the meanings of Mean and Median?
Yes I'm sure.
Median is literally the midpoint. If you're talking about a distribution that's essentially a skewed normal, median will often give you a more meaningful measure. In this case, however, we're talking about a truncated distribution that's extremely highly skewed. One side can basically go to infinity (hypothetically anyway), but the other side has a hard stop at zero.
If you've got 9,999 people with an income of 0 and 1 person with an income of 10,000, the mean is 1 but the median is 5,000.
If that 1 person's income increases the following year to 100,000, the mean will change to 10, but the median changes to 50,000.