WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — For most people, the performance of the economy can be summed up in one number: How much money am I making?

On Thursday, the Labor Department said average hourly earnings were flat in June at $24.95 an hour. But I’m going to argue that, for the typical family, earnings are growing faster than you might think.

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Everyone can figure out their own finances for themselves, but if we want to generalize for all families, we have to rely on aggregate economic statistics, which unfortunately can sometimes cloud the picture as much as they clarify it.

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For instance, per-capita income (which means all the income divided equally among all of us) has risen by 60% since 2000 to nearly $42,000. That sounds like solid growth, until we remember that prices have risen about 40% in that time. After adjusting for inflation, that means real per-capita income is up about 20% in 15 years.

But that’s the average (or mean): You add up all the income and divide it by the number of people who earned it. The average income isn’t necessarily typical. For instance, if Warren Buffett walks into a bar full of working-class Americans, the average income instantly goes from about $30,000 a year to about $700 million. But no one got a raise (except maybe the bartender who’s hoping for a big tip.)

If we want to know what the typical person earns, we should use median incomes, not mean or average incomes. The median is the midpoint, where half of the people in the bar earn less and half earn more. In Buffett’s new watering hole, the median income is still $30,000, because the typical patron earns $30,000.

According to the Census Bureau, the average or mean family income in 2013 was $84,687, but the median family income was $63,815. After adjusting for inflation, real median incomes had dropped about 7% between 2000 and 2013.

Using more up-to-date numbers through April of this year, Sentier Research figures that real median incomes have recovered some of that lost ground. In the past six months, real median incomes have grown at a 3% annual rate. For the first time since the recession of 2008, the typical family is getting ahead.

The typical family’s finances have really benefited from the low inflation we’ve experienced in the past year. But they are also making more in nominal terms.

When economists talk about wage growth, they usually refer to the average hourly wage. Those numbers are widely reported along with nonfarm payroll growth and the unemployment rate each month.

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In June, average hourly earnings for all workers were $24.95, up 2% in the past year. Any increase is good, but the pace is discouraging because it’s still far below the 3% to 4% wage gains that were common in the mid- to late-1990s.

Other indicators of wage growth have also improved modestly. The employment cost index, which averages benefit costs as well as wages and salaries, is up 2.5% in the past year, the best since 2008.

But those gains in the ECI may not be typical of all workers, because the bulk of the growth in compensation went to people in sales occupations, where average compensation rose 6.2%. Other occupations showed little acceleration in average compensation.

The trend was even worse in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report on median wages of full-time workers, which have grown just 1.5% in the past year. That’s not so good.

It looks like average wages might be going up for the same reason average incomes went up in Buffett’s bar: A few outliers pulled up the average.

That conclusion may be deceiving, however, according to researchers at the Atlanta Fed. Their wage growth tracker is probably the most sophisticated measurement of wage growth we have, because it looks at wage growth for individual workers over a period of a year, so it measures actual raises received by actual workers, not aggregated data that compare the wages of Person A with the wages of Person Z a year later.

And what does the wage growth tracker say? That the median raise over the past year was 3.3% through May, up from 2.3% a year ago. The median raise for college-educated workers and for prime working-age workers was even higher at 3.5%.

Younger workers and those with less education didn’t fare as well. Related research at the San Francisco Fed has found that about 15% of workers received no raise at all in the past year, including 20% of workers who are paid hourly and 24% of workers who have less than a high school degree.

Government and corporate policies should target those workers for assistance. Better skills would clearly help them. And raising the minimum wage and making more people eligible for overtime pay would really help, too.