> They are, but do not forget that in Europe, our take-home wages already have healthcare, social security and pension contributions taken care of, and our housing and general cost of living (e.g. groceries) are also vastly lower than in the US.

Well, Europe is big. Cost of living differ between different places.

You can look at measures like 'disposable income' or similar metrics.

Doesn't really matter too much what specific metric you use, US incomes are higher.

Thanks for the source you linked to. To quote them:

> Changing the price deflator used to adjust wages for inflation can boost measured wage growth. But wage growth would still lag far behind growth in economywide productivity, [...]

They are either using difference inflation metrics for productivity vs wages, or their definition of 'far' is different from mine.

Have a look at the labour share of gdp. Eg at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG or https://taxfoundation.org/labor-share-net-income-within-hist...

Since 1950, the amount of compensation going to labour has fluctuated around 59% - 65% of total GDP in the US. A fairly narrow range; and no reason to say anything like 'lag[ging] far behind'.

Because we are looking at a ratio, it doesn't matter how or even whether we adjust for inflation here.

So all productivity improvements that make it into GDP also make it proportionally into wages. You can't really ask for more, can you?

Whether wages have stagnated is then a question of whether real GDP has stagnated. And, alas, unions aren't really known for driving productivity in the US. Just the opposite.

Of course, you can argue about median vs average. And that's a very valid discussion to have.