Are we sure per capita GDP is the measure we want to use, though? Doesn't that just take the overall GDP and divide by population?
When I look at median income over time versus per capita GDP over time, adjusting both for inflation, they're both increasing, but they're also diverging because the bulk of the gains are concentrated at the top.
That is as big a reason people are having a hard time making ends meat nowadays as anything. Unfortunately, fixing that trend will require reversing most of the tax code changes made in the last half century and a lot of aggressive anti trust action - i.e., breaking up markets allowed to consolidate too much.
I don't see any of that happening without a clean sweep of DC, though.
> Are we sure per capita GDP is the measure we want to use, though?
Oh I completely agree that GDP is a terrible measure of prosperity (and even median income is lacking, as you noticed). But I was not using it to measure individual/median prosperity, but the overall material wealth of the country, to debunk the assertion that a single teacher's salary could comfortably sustain a family then only because of a unique, brief set of circumstances that materially enriched the US.
We always have to be careful with per capita averages. If one billionaire increased his prosperity by $10B, and the other 400 million people decreased theirs by $10 each, we would say the country's average prosperity increased.