Wills Wing started building gliders,
there was the oil embargo,
Nixon says "I'm not a crook", and the Vietnam war ended

Wills Wing is celebrated its 40th anniversary this year. It
started building hang gliders in a pivotal year. The wider world was changing in
ways that wouldn't be evident until much later. A long run trend toward higher
wages ended and a new economic world began. This is a reality that prospective
hang glider pilots have lived with for the full history of hang gliding in the
US.

http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/trends_reduced_earnings_for_men_in_america/

For most of the past century, a good job was a ticket to the
middle class. Hitched to the locomotive of rapid economic growth, the wages of
the typical worker seemed to go in only one direction: up. From 1950 to 1970,
the average earnings of male workers increased by about 25 percent each decade.
And these gains were not concentrated among some lucky few. Rather, earnings
rose for most workers, and almost every prime-aged male (ages 25-64) worked.

Technological advancement and ever-broadening global markets brought
opportunities that increasingly educated American workers raced to embrace. This
resulted in steadily rising living standards, generations of children who out
earned their parents, and a thriving middle class.

But in the mid-1970s, that pattern abruptly changed. Technological change and
globalization continued to power both economic growth and the total earnings of
the work force. Women, who were entering the market at increasing rates, enjoyed
the fruits of that prosperity in rising wages. But the fortunes of a large
segment of workers — male workers lacking specialized skills — were unhitched
from the engine of growth.

Over the past 40 years, a period in which U.S. GDP per capita more than
doubled after adjusting for inflation, the annual earnings of the median
prime-aged male have actually fallen by 28 percent. Indeed, males at the
middle of the wage distribution now earn about the same as their counterparts in
the 1950s! This decline reflects both stagnant wages for men on the job, and the
fact that, compared with 1969, three times as many men of working age don’t work
at all.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/mens-earnings-havent-grown-since-the-1970s-why/262296/

What's happening? As Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney explained in a
report for the Hamilton Project, median annual earnings for men are actually
in worse shape than the Census shows. When you calculate the earnings of all men
-- not just those working full-time -- you see an awful 28 percent plunge in
median real wages from 1969 to 2009.

Behind the poverty numbers, the saddest part of today's Census report isn't a
new piece of information. It's the confirmation of 30 years of awful wage growth
for men, even fully employed men. In other words, this is not merely a reality
of Obama's America, but also both Bush's America and Reagan's America (real male
wages clearly grew under Clinton). Men are falling behind, and it's not
particularly clear that they -- or anybody -- have the tools or ideas to end the
trend.

http://www.epi.org/publication/ib330-productivity-vs-compensation/

The hourly compensation of a typical worker grew in tandem with productivity
from 1948–1973. That can be seen in Figure A, which presents both the cumulative
growth in productivity per hour worked of the total economy (inclusive of the
private sector, government, and nonprofit sector) since 1948 and the cumulative
growth in inflation-adjusted hourly compensation for private-sector
production/nonsupervisory workers (a group comprising over 80 percent of payroll
employment). After 1973, productivity grew strongly, especially after 1995,
while the typical worker’s compensation was relatively stagnant. This divergence
of pay and productivity has meant that many workers were not benefitting from
productivity growth—the economy could afford higher pay but it was not providing
it.

Notice that hourly compensation became decoupled from productivity increases at
just about our pivotal year, 1973.

Changes since 1973. Male compensation (and men's ability to purchase hang
gliders) has not grown in real terms since 1973.

Figure B provides more detail on the productivity-pay disparity from 1973 to
2011 by charting the accumulated growth since 1973 in productivity; real average
hourly compensation; and real median hourly compensation of all workers, and of
men and of women. As Figure B illustrates, productivity grew 80.4 percent from
1973 to 2011, enough to generate large advances in living standards and wages if
productivity gains were broadly shared. But there were three important “wedges”
between that growth and the experience of American workers.

First, as shown in Figure B, average hourly compensation—which includes the pay
of CEOs and day laborers alike—grew just 39.2 percent from 1973 to 2011, far
lagging productivity growth. In short, workers, on average, have not seen their
pay keep up with productivity. This partly reflects the first wedge: an overall
shift in how much of the income in the economy is received in wages by workers
and how much is received by owners of capital. The share going to workers
decreased.

Without the growing income that men experienced before the early
seventies, men's discretionary income did not allow for easy purchase of non
necessary items like hang gliders. The hang gliding manufacturers developed in
an era of constrained finances (for men at least). This limited their growth and
their future prospects. They competed not just for time but also for money with
other sports. As Belinda told me, "No wonder men are so cranky."

The rent is too damn high.
We'll all be renting soon.

During this time period we have had another group of products that has
dramatically increased in value while costing less each year. The
Apple II went on
sale in June, 1977 and accessible computer power has been increasing ever
since. One measure of the increased value of computing resources is
Moore's Law.

It has been a common perception for more than thirty years that you get more
every year for your money from computing devices. That is there is not inflation
when it comes to computing power but rather staggering deflation, i.e., wait
just a little while and you'll get much more for your money. And this goes on
and on, never seeming to slow down (there is exponential growth in computing
power).

Of course, many other products don't experience these huge increases in value.
We have this perception of rapidly increasing value of some of what we purchase
with our discretionary income and it conflicts with the slow inflationary
decrease in the overall value of money. If we only purchased computing power and
nothing else we wouldn't be experiencing inflation at all.

We have experienced these conflicting price signals over the last three decades,
so it is not always clear what was happening economically. Even with the lack of
income growth, the world is changing with lots of new and interesting gadgets.

Finally, some feel that the government is misreporting or under
reporting actual inflation. At the extremes this is seen as yet another
federal government conspiracy. Those on the far ends feel that there is much
more inflation than the CPI captures. I doubt that this is the case (see
here). They look around and say that prices are much higher than they have
experienced before and they are feeling under siege economically (see graphs
above).

But if it were actually the case that general inflation is much higher (that
money is decreasing in value at a higher rate) than the federal government is
letting on, then hang gliders are even a better value than we have found so far.
If the rate of inflation has been seven percent since 1976, then Wills Wing
would be selling T2C's at about $700 in 1976 dollars (instead of over $2,100).
And a Falcon would go for $300.

I do hope that this last dip into fantasy land hasn't soured you on the notion
that it is still far better to make our measurements with a device that is
constant or nearly constant over time.