Real Wages and Wage-adjusted Debt
To find out if you're economically better off or not, you not only have to check to see whether your real wage is rising or falling, but you also have to check to see if your debt-to-income ratio (debt leverage) is rising or falling.
Healthy economies are "wage economies"--where most national services are provided by the private sector, so that most of all national income comes from wages. Such economies carry a level of all-sector debt which is about 3 times the total sum of all wages paid.
In the US from 1947-1972, there was just such a wage economy. Most services were provided by the private sector, so that most national income came from wages--and total (all-sector) debt remained at about 3 multiples of total wages paid:
As you can see above, not only did debt loads remain low (~3 multiples of all wages paid), but real mean wages doubled in just 25 years! In contrast to healthy ("wage") economies, there are also unhealthy ones--where wages no longer represent most of all national income.
When wages no longer represent most national income, it means that the private sector didn't provide enough of a majority of all services for there to be an efficient allocation of resources. Government provided proportionally more.
When more services are provided by government, the allocation of resources becomes less efficient--to the point where debt increases faster than income does instead of remaining entirely stable (in relation to income growth).
This is because private actors no longer have the means to allocate as much of the nation's resources as before--so that more and more of society's resources are allocated by fewer and fewer people (ie, by government bureaucrats). Such inefficient allocation harms productivity and growth.
A good example of what happens when more resources get allocated by fewer and fewer people, is the USA from the early 1970s, all the way up to 2016:
As you can see above, real mean wages are no longer rising, and debt loads are no longer stable at 3 multiples of the total wages paid.
It would be better for the United States to return to the "wage economy" of the mid-twentieth century, rather than continuing with the "entitlement economy" which we've had ever since then--with government providing proportionally more and more services, and the private sector providing less and less.
It would be better to return to the left side below than it would be to remain on the right:
Reference
[1] IRS. SOI Tax Stats - Individual Time Series Statistical Tables. [scroll down the page for reports of relevant years; the number reporting wages for years prior to 1990 was estimated as being 85% of total individual tax returns] https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-time-series-statistical-tables
[2] 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
[3] Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), All Sectors; Debt Securities and Loans; Liability, Level [TCMDO], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TCMDO