Yikes... this one right here:

(about halfway down)

my economics education is admittedly limited, but that seems terrifying... that says that the entire economy is a speculative bubble, since long before I was born... and this graph ends before the internet, before the dotcom bubble, before the accelerating cycles of VC tech speculation that have happened since... I have to imagine an updated version of this would look much worse.

My only complaint is that I think a lot of these graphs should be on logarithmic scales.

1973 is when the Heritage Foundation was founded.

So basically, the US dollar which is the global reserve currency, goes off gold standard, Israel gets a shit ton of money suddenly, and everyone is poor, fat, unhappy, divorced, living with parents, and without a home at a decent point in life. The global birth rate goes down. Savings accounts are fucked. It's almost like we should have a currency backed by something other than the sentiment of some old rich white men that belong in a rest home.

Skip to the end and you'll see that the driving factor is less beef consumption

If you look at the CPI one that was steady for years then started going up, that would be when we started targeting a standard amount of inflation. Many of the other graphs can be attributed to this.

I think you could argue this change also allowed people to get pay rises or maintain pay and still be worse off, which could explain other graphs.