Why this wasn't enough
One other piece of information of note is that, as you can see from before, there has been a steady increase in wages from 2013 to 2021. For the most part, this results in ~3% yearly wage increases:
This might seem nice, but in practice we have inflation to contend with; prices increase over time! The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes public information on inflation, so let's chart our wage increases compared to inflation over time. Here's some inflation data provided by the BLS for the San Francisco Bay Area region, both for overall inflation and for individual subcomponents (e.g. rent inflation):
Inflation data
The numbers in the table represent CPI, which is an index
proportional to the price of goods during that time. We've also calculated
a new field, cpiCumul, which represents cumulative increase in
CPI value since
To compare inflation rates with pre-2023 wages, we will project this 3% yearly increase forwards to the present day:
As we can see, when taking into account inflation, wages have not measurably increased since 2013. Furthermore, our effective wages would have fallen during the pandemic given these projected wage increases.
This is exacerbated by increases in renting costs over the past decade (change the selection above to see this for yourself!). Rent prices in the SF Bay Area have increased by ~50%, compared to a projected 36% for wages.