Where can I find pre-1951 median wage information?

Question

I'm working on some data visualization for buying power pre-WW2, but I'm having trouble actually getting to information from before 1951. So far I have found data from 1951-present from social security.gov. However, I am trying to look back as far as 1935 to examine how WW2 industry affected average wages. I have found reports for single years (IRS publications), but no tables of year-by-year information before 1950. I've seen documents examining price trends pre-1950, but can't seem to find the underlying data they reference.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

Answer 1

I'm not very expert on this subject, but since no one has answered, and I was wondering just how hard it would be to find, I've spent a little time searching.

The conclusion? It's pretty hard to find. I don't have a satisfactory answer to your actual question.

According to this PDF slide deck, income was not solicited on the US Census until 1940, so that doesn't provide you with a whole lot of pre-1951 data.

While I'm not very expert in it, my understanding is that the Current Population Survey (CPS) is the best source for longitudinal data, as long as you don't need fine-grained geographies. However, it appears that the CPS also doesn't extend much before 1951 -- I infer that from this table detailing methodology changes, which begins in 1947. This page also has a note, "If you have any questions, please Call 301-763-3243" -- this may be a case where calling that number or someone in your a state Census Data Center in your state or finding a "data dissemination specialist" for your Census region is in order.

People forget that our tax dollars pay for people to help you with questions like this! Of course it would be awesome if we could just find the answer online, but... well, if you call and learn something, you could post the answer here as a signpost for the next person with a similar question. (Or you could encourage whomever you talk to to consider monitoring this site and fielding questions directly!)

Update: If I understand IPUMS correctly, I requested income data from all years from 1850-1950 and the only rows with non-blank values were for 1950. So it may simply be that it wasn't systematically collected before then.

Answer 2

Do you want average per capita income? Average household income? Or total national income (below)?

• National total income since 1929. This is a graph but if you poke around you can probably find the tabular data. Yep. On the left side of the screen near the top is a "Download" link. Click it and you can download an XLS file. There are also options for a text, space delimited file and text, comma delimited file.
• National total income since 1929, compensation of employees.
• Gross savings as percent of national gross income since 1929. This will tell you about how much disposable income people had.
• Here's the search for 'income' from the Federal Reserve I did.
• Real mean and median income for families and individuals, since 1947. This PDF should also help. Graph of yearly data. Wow. The bottom 20% wage earners hardly gained anything in 40 years, pdf page 3.
• BLS has raw data but I don't know how far back it goes.