U.S. inflation remains above Fed's target rate

[progree]

16. Something else I learned in middle school, well before -- it helps to take a nap

Source: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/02/are-wages-increasing-or-decreasing

... I tediously moused over point by point gathering the data from their graph (the numbers for each point pop up, so I didn't have to "read" the graph like back in middle school).

I thought WTF, did I really have to do that? So I looked at it again. At the lower left of the 2nd graph at the Source link is a "Download data" link, which I saw before all the mousing, and I had clicked on it, and it just showed the same page in its entirety as a PDF file or something, or that's what I thought. I thought, that's dumb and not helpful at all.

After my slumber and reading your post, I decided to take a second look. And yes, after clicking on the "Download data", I looked carefully at what was in the right side window of my browser, and noticed the file name it was proposing to be opened or saved was "fredgraph.xls". Uhhh, .xls (Excel), I shoulda looked at that, and indeed it has all the data for the graph. Duh.

I scraped the ECI column and inserted it in my spreadsheet in a column next to my tediously point-by-point collected data and verified they were the same (subtracting the new column from the original column and verifying all entries were 0.0, but it turns out that their spreadsheeet data has a few more digits of accuracy which wouldn't be noticable on the graph, but for next time I put the new data in place of my tediously collected old data).

Anyway, the power of a nap.

I may come up with another graph going back further, now that I know that getting all the data is a 15 second operation.

I also noticed that it says Q2.2009 is "100". Not a lot of real wage progress in the nearly 14 years since then, but its some (latest reading is Q1.2023 at 102.6).

They have instructions "How these graphs were created", that I can probably follow (after a nap) and extend backwards before 2009.