I don't get it - if you're on any kind of growth curve at all, you should be getting wealthier.
The drop from a 3% curve to a 2% curve just means you're getting wealthier slower, but you can't lose wealth unless the growth goes negative.
He's right about not being able to afford his dad's house, but that's because when his dad bought it, it was probably a middle-income area. Now, thanks to city growth, it's probably a middle-to-upper income area.
So he's comparing apples to oranges.
Well, it's possible for their to be distortion from the top x% garnering a disproportionate amount of the growth in wealth. So while a country grows 2% per year the concentration could be at the top. This causes variation in wealth distribution to increase and this is what leads to the perception of people getting poorer. Poverty is a relative measure. In the past 30 years in the U.S. wealth has dramatically shifted to the top 1%. That is, the top 1% have a much higher portion of the nation's overall wealth today than they did 30 years ago.
Look for "GDP growth vs S&P 500 returns", the blue line. This should, I believe, correct for inflation - that's what the whole "corrected for CPI" thing is about.
Interesting things about this graph: national real GDP has been growing, and there is no obvious discontinuity in the 1970s - sure, there was a big recession then, but that's just a jog in the chart. Squinting at the data, it looks like the average rate of growth is about the same immediately before and after the 1970s; if anything the rate of growth is a tiny bit higher since then.
So, either this chart is bogus or the OP is bogus. Having already caught the OP citing false facts about domestic manufacturing output, I have my suspicions. But feel free to cite a better GDP chart; it will be nice to have in the files for when the next nonsense article comes along.
"Squinting at the data, it looks like the average rate of growth is about the same immediately before and after the 1970s; if anything the rate of growth is a tiny bit higher since then."
Look at actual wages, which stopped increasing in the early 1970s.
(This shows household income, which is slightly increasing, but only because more women are in the workforce now than in 1970; personal income is stagnant.)
The drop from a 3% curve to a 2% curve just means you're getting wealthier slower, but you can't lose wealth unless the growth goes negative.
He's right about not being able to afford his dad's house, but that's because when his dad bought it, it was probably a middle-income area. Now, thanks to city growth, it's probably a middle-to-upper income area. So he's comparing apples to oranges.