lower. To have an accurate view of a nation's wealth in any given year, inflation has to be taken into account and real wages must be used as one measuring stick. There are further limitations in the traditional measures of wages, such as failure to incorporate additional employment benefits, or not adjusting for a changing composition of the overall workforce. An alternative is to look at how much time it took to earn enough money to buy various items in the past, which is one version of the definition of real wages as the amount of goods or services that can be bought. Such an analysis shows that for most items, it takes much less work time to earn them now than it did decades ago, at least in the United States. Example Consider an example economy with the following wages over three years. Also assume that the inflation in this economy is 2% per year: Year 1: $20,000 Year 2: $20,400 Year 3: $20,808 Real wage = W/i (W = wage, i = inflation, can also be subjugated as interest). If the figures shown are real wages, then wages have increased by 2% after inflation has been taken into account. In effect, an individual making this wage actually has more ability to buy goods and services than the previous year. However, if the figures shown are nominal wages then real wages are not increasing at all. In absolute dollar amounts, an individual is bringing home more money each year, but the increases in inflation actually zeroes out the increases in their salary. Given that inflation is increasing at the same pace as wages, an individual cannot actually afford to increase their consumption in such a scenario. The nominal wage increases a worker sees in his paycheck may give a misleading impression of whether he is "getting ahead" or "falling behind" over time. For example, the average worker’s paycheck increased 2.7% in 2005, while it increased 2.1% in 2015, creating an impression for some workers that they were "falling behind". However, inflation was 3.4% in 2005, while it was only 0.1% in 2015, so workers were actually "getting ahead" with lower nominal paycheck increases in 2015 compared to 2005. Trends Historically, the trends of real wages are typically divided into two phases. The first phase, known as the Malthusian phase of history, consists of the period of time before the