Earned Real GDP Per Capita
Real GDP Per Capita is supposed to tell you how rich you are, but some of the GDP wasn't earned, it was borrowed, instead.
Also, the qualitative adjustments which began to be made regarding the Consumer Price Index (CPI) from the 1990s forward--imputing value into products which is unrelated to "[sticker price] * [sales volume]" (the value consumers had put onto those products)--may be underestimating actual price inflation nowadays.
Those two issues make Real GDP Per Capita flawed as an estimate of how rich we are. A better estimate is to take non-borrowed income per capita--ie., how much we actually earned each year. The top image shows the non-borrowed income per capita and I will copy it here:
As you can see, using Real Non-borrowed Income Per Capita (RNBIPC), there are several multi-year spans where America was more poor than before. In contrast, official reports tend to show America almost always getting richer over time, but all official reports include borrowed money in some form or another. If you had to borrow it, you didn't really earn it.
A special case is when we sell US equity (stocks) abroad in order to boost our domestic consumption. In this case, we are only borrowing from our future selves, because we are selling off some of our future earning power.
The graph above corrects for borrowed income, but does not correct for bias in calculation of CPI (inflation). Here is a chart from the above series, restricted to the time from 1959-1988:
As you can see, in 1960, real earned income was $25,799.37 (in constant 2018 dollars), and in 1988, it was $42,940.33 (in constant 2018 dollars)--America was 1.6 times as rich in 1988 when compared to 1960.
Now, below is the same series but it is adjusted using a unique method where the growth in immediately-spendable currency (hard currency + checking account balances) is fitted to the growth in the CPI from 1960-1988.
Prices had exactly quadrupled by 1988, but the growth in immediately-spendable currency only increased by a factor of 3.52643. This means that the velocity of money increased, so that existing money changed hands a little faster than before:
As you can see, the endpoints have the same numbers, real earned income in 1960 was $25,799.37 (in constant 2018 dollars) and, again, in 1988, it was $42,940.33.
The formula put to use in order to "retrofit" growth in money supply to growth in prices was calibrated to the period from 1960-1988 because that time period did not involve qualitative adjustments to the CPI.
This new graph could, at least in some sense, be thought of as the "objective" inflation rate--because it is entirely quantitative and does not involve subjective imputation of value. Now let's look at the entire time frame to see how rich we are growing lately when estimated by this "objective" measure of inflation:
This graph paints a different picture than the official Real GDP Per Capita (or even the Real Non-Borrowed Income Per Capita from above!). The estimate from this graph suggests that America was more rich in 1959 than in 2018--and that the overall peak "US earnings per capita" occurred back in 1990.
Unless it can be demonstrated that the growth in the money supply from 1960-1988--which had been calibrated to the growth in prices from 1960-1988--does not apply to our current conditions (perhaps because we're "exporting" printed money now?), we would have to accept that America is more poor now than it was 60 years ago.
Reference
[1] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Net Exports of Goods and Services [NETEXP], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NETEXP
[2] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Net government saving [A922RC1A027NBEA], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A922RC1A027NBEA
[3] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Gross Domestic Product [GDPA], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPA
[4] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items [CPIAUCNS], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCNS
[5] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Population [B230RC0A052NBEA], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B230RC0A052NBEA
[6] Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), Currency Component of M1 Plus Demand Deposits [CURRDD], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CURRDD