A viral claim says a minimum-wage worker in 1971 lived like someone making $100K today. The number is real. The explanation everyone reaches for isn’t the whole story.
https://chrisabraham.substack.com/p/the-emptier-country-why-a-1971-minimum?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=aqj1

Then there's the piece that isn't economic at all, it's psychological, and I think it's the most underrated variable of the four. Nobody in 1971 was budgeting for cable, and there was no cable to budget for. Nobody had a phone bill, because there were no mobile phones, just one hardwired line the whole family shared. Nobody expected an annual flight to Cancún or Lisbon, international travel was rare and expensive and mostly for the genuinely rich. There was no Netflix, no Spotify, no Amazon Prime, no forty-dollar-a-month gym membership, no app subscriptions quietly draining a checking account one at a time. A dollar in 1971 wasn't just worth more in raw purchasing power, it had far fewer places it was expected to go. The paycheck went further partly because the culture hadn't yet invented two dozen new places to spend it.

Very good point.