A disaster. Economy is a flow of capital, it cycles up. USA needs the general public to have money for necessities as well as a little more for saving and then extras.
Top earnings come from the support of 1000s of participants with lesser earnings. This is an unhealthy economic trend. It's more than a stagnation risk.
Issues like these are created in a short term but take comparatively longer to correct.
Depends. Can I bribe the machines with an all expenses paid luxury holiday getaway, an RV, private school tuition, and real estate like I can with Supreme Court Justices? Or do I have to pollute the AI's training data somehow and hope for the best. Seems far more efficient to me if the rich just buy politicians the regular way.
It's amazing how even though this is happening, so many of the people on this list (and those who aspire to be there) have gone to straight up war with the public. Also curious how many are militant Zionists:
This shouldn't be a surprise. The US came out of WWII with similarly high debt to GDP. They only corrected that through financial repression, and that's likely to be their only chance of lowering that debt ratio today.
If we don't spend the next few decades skating by while the currency is debased under our noses, I assume its because there's a much more severe and tragic response.
It doesn't directly. Financial repression does though, its a "solution" to high federal debt and leaves the average person having to eat the cost.
Its a bit like austerity, but instead of taking a share of everyone's wealth they just make all of our stored wealth worse less. They do that by inflating asset prices much faster than wages can keep up, meaning those large corporations at the top get rich while the average person falls further and further behind.
It seems like the economy is kind of doing this on its own? The Fed has been keeping rates higher, despite political pressure, without yet having achieved the inflation target.
The economy is a measure of past financial behavior. I'm not sure how the economy could do this on its own, we're doing this to ourselves. I say "we" collectively there, these are all results of human choices not an amorphous concept of an economy.
> I'm not sure how the economy could do this on its own, we're doing this to ourselves.
i dont understand. the economy is the royal we doing things. the economy doesnt experience time if we arent doing thongs to ourselves. this isnt a distinction with a difference
> It seems like the economy is kind of doing this on its own?
This is what I was replying to. At least to me, saying the economy did something on its own takes the agency and responsibility off of us. My point was that the economy is just backward looking analysis of how money changes hands, it does nothing by itself and when things change its the result of us making decisions.
I suppose I read “repression” as something that is induced by policymakers rather than chosen by the masses, so I framed my response in those terms. I think we agree though, the wording is just different.
Those profits are fake. It's the government printing money and inflating the numbers, but no consumable wealth was created, so there is nothing to distribute.
Nonsense. If you have a bag with 10 diamonds, and you sell 1, you find the richest person willing to buy one, so if he pays you 1 million, it is guessed that the 10 diamonds are worth 10 million. But the 10 million dont even exist. If you try to sell the second diamond. The richest one doesnt want it or wants to pay less. So the second richest wants to pay half a million. If you sell it, now the diamonds lost half his value. And if you try to sell the third diamond, nobody wants it, now the diamonds are worth zero.
where did the wealth gone? Nowhere. It never existed. The 10 million were just a guess
To be fair, Clinton pulled off a surplus through clever accounting though it would have been comparatively close either way.
I'm not sure how you could possibly narrow the issue down to two presidents' tax cuts alone. What about all the war spending? Or money printing? Or a partially implemented half step towards socialized health care?
Both parties are responsible for the debt we hold today, they have just argued about what to spend it on along the way.
I'm not sure of your point here or what you may have thought I was arguing for.
Where exactly we can find causes of our massive debt is an interesting question, and almost certainly wouldn't fall solely on tax cuts from two presidents.
Whether you agree with the current president or the insane things he sometimes says (I don't) is entirely separate.
>Rising spending relative to GDP explains about two-thirds of the growth in annual budget deficits since 2001, while declining revenue explains one-third.
>Most debt (77% of GDP) can be attributed to bipartisan legislation.
The US also kept much higher marginal tax rates for a few more decades after that, which helped the common people by disincentivizing the post-Reagan short-term-financial-games profit-maximization and wealth-and-income-consolidation.
I feel like the earnings structure is quite different than it was post-war though. Today there's a larger difference between "income rich" and "capital rich" in terms of their options for avoiding tax incidence.
Like in 1947 a factory owner's profits would show up as high income. Today they wouldn't (money is in share prices and complex financial arrangements / borrowing). The high marginal rates hit the chief engineer instead, who actually works for a living.
Seems like a good reason to figure out some additional soak-the-rich taxes! (Back in the 30s that was a slogan that Americans could rally behind..! Not so much right in the last several decades.)
But it's also disingenuous to claim that none of today's approaches would show up as high income. A lot of old money would be protected still, a lot of new-money would be hit.
Isn't it telling that there was so much massive development of American industry in the post-WWII era and yet there weren't any Musks or Bezos or Gates? A country that had minted tycoons like Getty and Rockefeller and Carnegie stopped for a while. A guy like Howard Hughes was involved in several areas of development but didn't touch the guys who came before him or after him overall...
Exactly the true wealth of America is no longer income or property its all shares. It could be argued the American 40T debt is pretty much because of tax avoidance due to hiding wealth in stocks and related possibilities.
Stock value is not real wealth. The stock value is a guess about future profits along the next 10 years. You can't give to workers guessed future wealth. It doesn't exists today.
No argument there, im simply making the observation that a lot of people are avoiding tax by hiding their wealth as shares and this is hurting the gov ability to tax and pay its debts.
Its a really tricky problem to solve. One simple solution would be to tax any loan secured by owned assets as regular income, though there may be situations that hits more average people, say if you take out a HELOC on your home.
It is pretty absurd that one can borrow against a mountain of owned stocks and live of the loan without it being considered income.
The error is to assume that there is wealth to tax. Imagine an island with 3 people, which produces 2 burgers a day, so the poorest one can't get a burger. Now the government taxes the richest person, and buys one burger. who lost the burger?
The burger is taken from the poorest person that was able to buy a burger. Now you have 2 people who cannot buy a burger.
This is why you cannot tax unrealized gains. You are sacking the poorest. Is not matter of how the government gets the money. The problem is that the government spends the money.
The poorest always pay all government spending. Always.
> The US also kept much higher marginal tax rates for a few more decades after that
This is a common trope, but it ignores that at the time the tax code had loopholes that could smuggle a freight train full of gold bars. Instead of lower marginal rates, people were taking their real estate and personal vehicles and everything else as tax deductions, and then weren't paying the high marginal rates to begin with. The lowering of marginal rates came with the closing of most of those loopholes, which is why the change had no effect on federal receipts as a percent of GDP, which has been in the same range since the end of WWII (and was much lower before it):
The thing that actually changed is that markets have consolidated a lot more than they were in the mid 20th century, and we have significantly more regulatory capture where e.g. corporations lobby to make their services required by law or to impede or prohibit new entrants to the market. Then consumers/workers have to pay more for those things while receiving nothing of value in return. Corporations take more money and it comes from labor.
You can't fix that by having workers continue paying the high prices to corporations and then having the government take more of the money to give to some other corporations/donors. You have to get back to competitive markets, efficiency and low barriers to entry.
Yeah, my thought exactly. Capital is the firm. Labor is the workforce. Wages are the return to labor and profit is the return to capital. Labor and capital are in eternal struggle for their piece of the pie.
Capital historically meant 'that part of production set aside for future production'. Machines, land improvements, infrastructure, intellectual property. Now it tends to include all assets used to generate wealth - including things like land which were once in their own category.
Wages are just money and may or may not become capital according to the discretion and opportunities of the employee.
It's not really out of whack, it's the normal trend, Karl Marx wrote it out in his labor theory of value over a century ago. The reason nobody learns that in school is because it's very convenient to the minority who accumulate money and power on the opposite end of the equation.
Anyone care to explain the downvotes? I am simply pointing out a glaring misuse of a word in the title, which made me curious about the author's background.
Although I'm non-downvoter, I doubt anyone thinks you're wrong. It's probably just that they feel that the comment is distracting or of uncertain relevance or something like that.
Your comment is too ambiguous so to you it might have a passive origin but readers assume you think the entire article is poorly written which in turn means your comment is just noise.
If you wanted to use this as an educational opportunity to say "income share of labor" and "income share of capital" you might have had a point, but I'm the one who has to tell you that.
It's ambiguous, because it lets the reader think for themselves about the implications of a straightforward fact?
If you do insist on being spoon fed - getting information about labor relations from Fortune magazine is like taking heath advice from a Luck Strike promotion. The article's cheery conclusion is: Yes, AI productivity is driving wages down - but we only need to be patient and wait for more jobs to replace them, not tax or regulate AI. Yes, unemployment is driving wages down - but more immigration will fix this, not make it worse. Yes, the deficit is high while corporate profits are up - but the solution is more jobs (how?) rather than more tax. Yes, smoking causes 'throat irritation' - but Lucky Strike is toasted.
So here's what I don't get: The United States is the world's largest consumer market. From what I can find, personal consumption expenditures (PCE) account for about two-thirds to 70% of total US economic output. We live and die on consumer spending and confidence.
So next we automate the bejeebus out of this economy with AI robots and Elon believes it grows 3x in under five years. Splendid. But if a consumer-driven economy has no payrolls, it eventually has no buyers. It just seems to me that ultimately, billionaires and investors cannot decouple themselves from the masses... but maybe it's a game of get mine before the system collapses?
Well, Elon thinks we'll all get a Universal High Income. Holding aside the irony of him thinking the future is socialism, that money has to come from somewhere. If all companies in the future depend on a handful of AI and Robotics companies, I guess that the money has to come from Elon. Seeing as the layoffs have started, what is he waiting for?
if a really powerful mafia got installed into your city, a very small violent group of people demanding people to pay to stay safe... how long before you start organizing? how long before they notice and do something about it?
Today, around 50% of US consumer spending is by the top 10% of wealthiest households. (per Moody's)
The end state of this looks like how humanity looked before the industrial revolution: A single-digit percent of the population has the vast majority of the wealth and virtually all real estate and luxury goods. Between 90% and 95% of the population has just enough to live on, and never enough to build generational wealth or have any class mobility.
I think those in poverty have an awful lot less ways to supplement bought food these days, they are largely legislated out of foraging in any meaningful way. So I think actually a large percentage will starve to death or be in prison.
Food banks. Church pantries. Welfare programs. Meals with family and friends. Eat way less meat. Get hardcore into meal prep. https://traumbooks.itch.io/the-sad-bastard-cookbook. People will find ways to eat as long as there isn't an active warzone.
I'm much more worried about what housing looks like in the future.
Food banks depend on the largesse of the people that can afford to buy food though, which, well... if the only people remaining in that group are the ones gleefully saying how they're going to create a permanent underclass...
I've done social-work–adjacent stuff and I know a lot of NGOs in my country are quite strained (of course, probably housing more than food, so I don't disagree that might be more of a concern). I imagine it wouldn't be too different in America.
No, there are laws against distributing food without a permit because (1) there are people who give poisoned food to homeless people and (2) there are rules about food safety.
People will take food without paying for it before dying. You don’t have to forage when you can loot grocery stores. At a point when a large percentage are going to die and the food is there, it will be bedlam and the police won’t be stopping it because their families will be part of the riot.
The notion that people will simply roll over and literally die for profit margins is absurd. The system will break and be rebuilt in that situation.
> People will take food without paying for it before dying.
Yeah, I don't know why people seem to not understand this.
There are so many guns in America.
When the shit hits the fan and a significant amount of people can't legally afford to buy their next 3 meals, there is likely to be a lot of deaths, but the primary reason won't be starvation.
It wouldn't actually cost that much money to feed everyone in the world. Global hunger could be wiped out today. More likely everyone will get just enough food, but luxury foods like meat (especially beef) and premium items will be uncommon. Like pre-industrial diets.
The "preppers" are some of the worst too. They'll be shooting people before that week is even done. Meanwhile their absurd "stash" only actually pencils out to about a month of supplies, then they also starve because they never seemed to notice that you have to start farming at some point, and therefore, have to be friendly and supportive with your neighbors instead of shooting them at the first sign of trouble.
The system never has to rebuild. Stable points aren't always at global inflection points. Feudalism can go back to reigning for the rest of human existence.
When they have enough robots, they won't need the rest of the system. I think Musk must have meant something like that when he said money won't matter.
One would expect that retirees are mostly living off capital rather than labor. Wouldn't an increased elderly population result in a lower labor share?
Or maybe something else. This paper suggests that as workers get older, they switch jobs less and get fewer raises:
"We find that a 60-year-old worker receives half the marginal product relative to when they were 20. Together with recent demographic trends, this can account for 59% of the recent decline in labor’s share of earnings in the United States."
It's amazing how even though this is happening, so many of the people on this list (and those who aspire to be there) have gone to straight up war with the public. Also curious how many are militant Zionists:
Machine intelligence could drive as much transfer from labor to capital in the next decade as the previous wage-to-financial economy produced in forty years.
This will push wealth concentration in leading OECD economies beyond the inequality seen in Brazil and Mexico.
Also productivity costs more in tooling than ever before per worker, so it's not a surprise that a smaller amount of capital goes to humans when the gains are majority from capital outlays, not labor improvements.
You know your claim simply doesn’t follow. Costs and profits can both go up. Why make such a silly straw man, since it makes the rest of anything you want to show much less well received?
It’s perfectly reasonable for gains in productivity to reward those taking risks for the gains.
And your graph also makes clear both corporate profits AND remuneration to employees have gone up significantly. And that profits are far more volatile than remuneration: most people willingly take stability over risk and choose salary over entrepreneurship, which is a reasonable choice.
Corporate profits are what has been growing retirement accounts, which has huge benefits to the majority of people nearing retirement. It’s not the us-vs-them binary option commonly sold.
How does this tie in with the opposing view’s narrative that gdp per capita has been increasing since the industrial revolution? I mean, this is an issue I’d actually like to take a side with—I do in fact dislike it whenever the latter statistic comes up because the actual and lived experience of cost of living and capital accrual in the present day is actually incredibly difficult, that even the prospect of home ownership looks bleak for many people.
I forsee this getting fixed by inflation, capital gains tax to stop people avoiding an inflation haircut, and an unrealised gains tax to stop people deferring paying.
Capital is non-consumable, so it is nonsensical to speak of workers taking "a share of capital." Perhaps we should speak of GDP, not capital.
The reasons why workers are taking a smaller share of GDP are:
1. GDP is fake. The government lies about GDP using tricks such as hedonic adjustments.
2. Increasing public spending means the government is taking a larger share of GDP. Of course, the more the government spends, the less workers can take.
3. Nobody is valuing "free" stuff like Google, YouTube or free ai. You like "free" stuff, but nothing is free. You always pay it one way or another. There is your "share of GDP"
It is misleading at this point to call it workers right? Isn't it employees?
And the "blue collar" guy in the top photo seems like it is pushing that feeling.
Also this mechanic will never change without heavy wealth taxing and regulating prices
of essentials like housing. Basically the entire world is in the same situation.
Young people should just not vote for old people in principle anymore.
Can someone connect the dots for me between "share went down" being "despite GDP went up"? One of those is a percentage and the other is an absolute amount. I would not expect that they would be directly related in and of themselves (in fact I would suspect that that they would move more independently). I am all for the idea that there are harms to having a massive wealth inequality, but the numbers in the article do suggest that US workers are on average taking home more than they were before, even if 'capital' is benefitting more (where those workers are also still the majority beneficiary of those capital returns), and yet the article seems to just dance around this and report it as if those workers are worse off in absolute terms.
This comes on top of other reporting that shows that real wages have been falling behind the inflation rate meaning people feel they are able to afford a more basic lifestyle than they could in the past otherwise all else being equal. That's the general zeitgeist and backdrop and this data seems to sort of complement that as a "oh that makes sense". The main issue is that inflation is now Rising higher than GDP growth
Yeah, see, that's a specific comparison that does point to things getting worse (and I don't disagree with that), but the article doesn't mention inflation once. I really don't like this 'well it doesn't matter whether the claims and logic are right so long as the vibes are', because if the issue is real-terms wages falling because inflation is high then that suggests a different origin and set of possible solutions than wages falling because their share of GDP is falling. In fact it's probably more important to not muddy a real issue with a bunch of reporting that doesn't accurately reflect what's going on.
The U.S. workers have forgotten how to go on strike. The capitalists are just laughing about all those online petitions, social media campaigns and demonstrations. Only big strikes can change things in our society. Your parents and grandparents still knew this.
While I think share of capital is a great metric, there are obviously flaws where it could be going on while everyone's lives improved. Which I think is happening to some extent, but to another extent I think folks lives are getting worse in meaningful ways like portion of income spent on basics like housing.
Are there 2-3 other key well-measured metrics that are as stark and explainable as this one (i.e. not a massive basket of goods) that well captures whether folks lives are improving or getting worse at a basic level?
107 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 38.1 ms ] threadTop earnings come from the support of 1000s of participants with lesser earnings. This is an unhealthy economic trend. It's more than a stagnation risk.
Issues like these are created in a short term but take comparatively longer to correct.
Pay peanuts, expect a circus.
At this point, we'll either have universal UBI -=or=- ongoing war.
Unfortunately, the latter is more profitable, so... the future is by design, probably.
The work on technology to take the place of policy is proceeding, thought slower than the leadership would prefer.
You prefer machines to make decisions?
You can just lay them off.
https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/
If we don't spend the next few decades skating by while the currency is debased under our noses, I assume its because there's a much more severe and tragic response.
Its a bit like austerity, but instead of taking a share of everyone's wealth they just make all of our stored wealth worse less. They do that by inflating asset prices much faster than wages can keep up, meaning those large corporations at the top get rich while the average person falls further and further behind.
i dont understand. the economy is the royal we doing things. the economy doesnt experience time if we arent doing thongs to ourselves. this isnt a distinction with a difference
This is what I was replying to. At least to me, saying the economy did something on its own takes the agency and responsibility off of us. My point was that the economy is just backward looking analysis of how money changes hands, it does nothing by itself and when things change its the result of us making decisions.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/222127/quarterly-corpora...
where did the wealth gone? Nowhere. It never existed. The 10 million were just a guess
Figure 1: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/why-the-national-de...
I'm not sure how you could possibly narrow the issue down to two presidents' tax cuts alone. What about all the war spending? Or money printing? Or a partially implemented half step towards socialized health care?
Both parties are responsible for the debt we hold today, they have just argued about what to spend it on along the way.
Where exactly we can find causes of our massive debt is an interesting question, and almost certainly wouldn't fall solely on tax cuts from two presidents.
Whether you agree with the current president or the insane things he sometimes says (I don't) is entirely separate.
https://www.crfb.org/papers/riches-rags-causes-fiscal-deteri...
>Rising spending relative to GDP explains about two-thirds of the growth in annual budget deficits since 2001, while declining revenue explains one-third.
>Most debt (77% of GDP) can be attributed to bipartisan legislation.
the big spend since 2001 was going to war
Like in 1947 a factory owner's profits would show up as high income. Today they wouldn't (money is in share prices and complex financial arrangements / borrowing). The high marginal rates hit the chief engineer instead, who actually works for a living.
But it's also disingenuous to claim that none of today's approaches would show up as high income. A lot of old money would be protected still, a lot of new-money would be hit.
Isn't it telling that there was so much massive development of American industry in the post-WWII era and yet there weren't any Musks or Bezos or Gates? A country that had minted tycoons like Getty and Rockefeller and Carnegie stopped for a while. A guy like Howard Hughes was involved in several areas of development but didn't touch the guys who came before him or after him overall...
It is pretty absurd that one can borrow against a mountain of owned stocks and live of the loan without it being considered income.
The burger is taken from the poorest person that was able to buy a burger. Now you have 2 people who cannot buy a burger.
This is why you cannot tax unrealized gains. You are sacking the poorest. Is not matter of how the government gets the money. The problem is that the government spends the money.
The poorest always pay all government spending. Always.
Apparently you can buy islands, super yachts and more with unrealized gains.
It's called "the marginal propensity to consume", which means that as a person gets richer, consumes a smaller percentage of his fortune.
This is a common trope, but it ignores that at the time the tax code had loopholes that could smuggle a freight train full of gold bars. Instead of lower marginal rates, people were taking their real estate and personal vehicles and everything else as tax deductions, and then weren't paying the high marginal rates to begin with. The lowering of marginal rates came with the closing of most of those loopholes, which is why the change had no effect on federal receipts as a percent of GDP, which has been in the same range since the end of WWII (and was much lower before it):
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
The thing that actually changed is that markets have consolidated a lot more than they were in the mid 20th century, and we have significantly more regulatory capture where e.g. corporations lobby to make their services required by law or to impede or prohibit new entrants to the market. Then consumers/workers have to pay more for those things while receiving nothing of value in return. Corporations take more money and it comes from labor.
You can't fix that by having workers continue paying the high prices to corporations and then having the government take more of the money to give to some other corporations/donors. You have to get back to competitive markets, efficiency and low barriers to entry.
I have half-jokingly wish a president would introduce a 95% tax bracket at some ridiculous number so this statistic will die.
Wages are just money and may or may not become capital according to the discretion and opportunities of the employee.
If you wanted to use this as an educational opportunity to say "income share of labor" and "income share of capital" you might have had a point, but I'm the one who has to tell you that.
If you do insist on being spoon fed - getting information about labor relations from Fortune magazine is like taking heath advice from a Luck Strike promotion. The article's cheery conclusion is: Yes, AI productivity is driving wages down - but we only need to be patient and wait for more jobs to replace them, not tax or regulate AI. Yes, unemployment is driving wages down - but more immigration will fix this, not make it worse. Yes, the deficit is high while corporate profits are up - but the solution is more jobs (how?) rather than more tax. Yes, smoking causes 'throat irritation' - but Lucky Strike is toasted.
So next we automate the bejeebus out of this economy with AI robots and Elon believes it grows 3x in under five years. Splendid. But if a consumer-driven economy has no payrolls, it eventually has no buyers. It just seems to me that ultimately, billionaires and investors cannot decouple themselves from the masses... but maybe it's a game of get mine before the system collapses?
if a really powerful mafia got installed into your city, a very small violent group of people demanding people to pay to stay safe... how long before you start organizing? how long before they notice and do something about it?
The end state of this looks like how humanity looked before the industrial revolution: A single-digit percent of the population has the vast majority of the wealth and virtually all real estate and luxury goods. Between 90% and 95% of the population has just enough to live on, and never enough to build generational wealth or have any class mobility.
I'm much more worried about what housing looks like in the future.
I've done social-work–adjacent stuff and I know a lot of NGOs in my country are quite strained (of course, probably housing more than food, so I don't disagree that might be more of a concern). I imagine it wouldn't be too different in America.
The notion that people will simply roll over and literally die for profit margins is absurd. The system will break and be rebuilt in that situation.
Yeah, I don't know why people seem to not understand this.
There are so many guns in America.
When the shit hits the fan and a significant amount of people can't legally afford to buy their next 3 meals, there is likely to be a lot of deaths, but the primary reason won't be starvation.
the guns will be user to kill each other, not the elite
in a way, doing the elite work, no need to kill the underclass, they will take care of pruning itself
Then they simply starve to death.
The "preppers" are some of the worst too. They'll be shooting people before that week is even done. Meanwhile their absurd "stash" only actually pencils out to about a month of supplies, then they also starve because they never seemed to notice that you have to start farming at some point, and therefore, have to be friendly and supportive with your neighbors instead of shooting them at the first sign of trouble.
The system never has to rebuild. Stable points aren't always at global inflection points. Feudalism can go back to reigning for the rest of human existence.
Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World https://www.amazon.com/dp/1780747411
Corporate profits versus labor income https://fred.stlouisfed.org/blog/2018/08/corporate-profits-v...
Why is labor going up? In part due to more hours worked:
Nonfarm Business Sector: Hours Worked for All Workers https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOANBS
If you divide labor income by hours worked, you should get hourly compensation:
Nonfarm Business Sector: Real Hourly Compensation for All Workers https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB
Working-age population is leveling off, though: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSQ647S
One would expect that retirees are mostly living off capital rather than labor. Wouldn't an increased elderly population result in a lower labor share?
Or maybe something else. This paper suggests that as workers get older, they switch jobs less and get fewer raises:
"We find that a 60-year-old worker receives half the marginal product relative to when they were 20. Together with recent demographic trends, this can account for 59% of the recent decline in labor’s share of earnings in the United States."
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2023/04/staff-working-paper-2023...
And no matter how you slice it, this is all working with national averages, which tell us little about anyone's personal situation.
https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/
This will push wealth concentration in leading OECD economies beyond the inequality seen in Brazil and Mexico.
Here's BLS data for total cost to employ for the last 25 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECIALLCIV
Note how much it has increased over simply wages, as it costs more and more to employee a person due to laws, benefits, and tooling.
Corporate Profits versus Labor Income https://fred.stlouisfed.org/blog/2018/08/corporate-profits-v...
It’s perfectly reasonable for gains in productivity to reward those taking risks for the gains.
And your graph also makes clear both corporate profits AND remuneration to employees have gone up significantly. And that profits are far more volatile than remuneration: most people willingly take stability over risk and choose salary over entrepreneurship, which is a reasonable choice.
Corporate profits are what has been growing retirement accounts, which has huge benefits to the majority of people nearing retirement. It’s not the us-vs-them binary option commonly sold.
US Wages Share of GDI at 75 Year Low
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238884
The reasons why workers are taking a smaller share of GDP are:
1. GDP is fake. The government lies about GDP using tricks such as hedonic adjustments.
2. Increasing public spending means the government is taking a larger share of GDP. Of course, the more the government spends, the less workers can take.
3. Nobody is valuing "free" stuff like Google, YouTube or free ai. You like "free" stuff, but nothing is free. You always pay it one way or another. There is your "share of GDP"
And the "blue collar" guy in the top photo seems like it is pushing that feeling.
Also this mechanic will never change without heavy wealth taxing and regulating prices of essentials like housing. Basically the entire world is in the same situation.
Young people should just not vote for old people in principle anymore.
Are there 2-3 other key well-measured metrics that are as stark and explainable as this one (i.e. not a massive basket of goods) that well captures whether folks lives are improving or getting worse at a basic level?