" Ezra Klein asked economists and politicians to submit their favorite charts. Here's Robert Frank's submission: My entry is the attached graph of what I call the Toil Index. It's an index I constructed to portray the most dramatic element of the middle-class squeeze -- the effort required to rent a house served by a school of average quality. "
Interesting chart showing both the rise of housing costs and (perhaps more importantly) the stagnation/decline of median incomes in the last 60 years.
The toil index has probably been mitigated by the rise of two-income households. I would be interested in seeing a chart taking into account median household income, not just median income.
Also, I would like to see this chart go further back in time. I would guess that the post-war era was probably a historic low for the "toil index." I wonder what this looked like in the 19th century.
