Real income at least in Germany is still below the 2019 values.

So is the cost of living.

My point is that if you look at Eurostat you will see that prices took a massive jump in the past two years compared to the years before, while the increase in DPI stayed mostly steady, with a slump in the pandemic.

And cost of living indicators have a problem in that they average out larger consumer baskets, and those baskets are going to be severely different over socioeconomic groups.

And house prices and thus rent and mortgages have outpaced the DPI indicator as well, meaning homeownership is even further out of reach.

And that is again an average, which is a problem because as urbanisation is going forward, jobs are getting concentrated around HCoL areas, so it doesn’t matter if homes in the middle of nowhere pad the averages in a negative direction when I can’t afford those either since I can’t get a job in the area.

And finally, the Eurozone is not the EU, and non-Eurozone countries were and are disproportionately hit by recessions since risk makes investors move into more stable currencies like the EUR and abandon smaller regional ones.

I’m just being negative here because a lot of the political turmoil we are experiencing has and economic basis, and the neoliberal status quo will fail if it can’t stabilise living standards, and is thus invested in telling everyone that everything is alright. And if they tell everyone everything is alright, you get a Biden-esque run into a Trumpian reckoning.

Kinda meaningless if it’s not per capita and doesn’t account for inflation. It’s pretty much always been at ATH apart from a blip during lockdown.