system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If increased per capita wealth=increased consumption=inflation that cancels out increases in wealth, how did per capita wealth ever increase in developed nations?

This is an argument that seems to come up every time a program that offers some sort of wealth redistribution like increasing the minimum wage or student debt forgiveness is discussed. The idea that if consumers get more money, the inflationary effects will cancel out their increase in wealth/income. 

But the entire history of industrialization and the middle class seems to disprove this concept. 

Am I missing something?
gpt
What matters is the supply of real goods and services, like food and housing and medical care and Netflix TV shows. We talk about economic growth in $ terms (or £ or € or whatever) because it's impractical to talk about all these goods and services individually, and money is the only way we have to aggregate them all. 

Luckily, we can control (albeit Imperfectly) for changes in prices that don't reflect changes in the real goods and services. Modern day statistical offices put considerable effort into this, and economic historians have calculated long time series of incomes and GDP controlling for inflation for a number of countries.

So we can talk about things like "real Income growth" and "GDP in volumes". 

So how can real incomes increase across an economy? Technological progress is one, increased efficiency of operation (e.g. well functioning price system, relatively uncorrupt government, not having a civil war), labour force, like healthier, better educated, higher proportion of working age, returns to scale (a large part of why foreign trade is valuable), etc. 

Redistribution can increase the amount of output of real goods and services, e.g. childhood nutrition and vaccines can pay off in multiple areas. Redistribution can also support civil peace. Conversely redistribution can also discourage this, e.g. higher taxes meaning reduced work effort, or more resources spent on tax avoidance and trying to stop tax avoidance. Some redistributist policies can have negative impacts on social peace, e.g. why cancel student loan debt but not debt a, say, plumber might take on to start their own business? Some redistributionist policies can create problems like moral hazard, etc. 

And, finally the more complex policies are, the more likely they are to interact in unexpected and undesirable ways, which is where things like poverty traps where as people's market incomes go up they can lose actual disposable income come from. 

TL:dr: what matters is real goods and services, not the money.