The other day my wife mentioned that median income in the US had gone down over the past few years, which led to a random thought while I was driving home.  Perhaps when median income is plotted over time it should be weighted based on the relative earning power of the current age of the population.  When a large portion of the population is at the age of their optimum earning power (around 50) you would expect median income to be higher than when a large portion is very young or very old.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/

At least it’ll make a good pair programming scenario next time I’m interviewing a candidate.