I don't see how 1971 is significant for any of these graphs. Looks like 1979 is when productivity / compensation really start to diverge. What happened in 1979?
It's interesting that this doesn't mention the productivity / wage divergence graph that also splits at 1973 that shows that productivity still really outperforms wages. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
I tried to Ctrl+F-ing for some themes:
Not one mention of: "wages, income, poverty, inequality, etc." as progress to this group is purely a tech phenomenon, and "never" by policy failures or from any kind of class issue.
Here are some non-technical things that were mentioned though: "civilization, West, Venice, Florence, American, United Kingdom, Pentagon, etc" - telling...
I don't think we know why this is not happening. The author of the paper doesn't seem to know either. The data simply shows this huge and growing gap between worker productivity and wages.
Are you questioning the accuracy of the data? Perhaps it's not been measured correctly and wages actually HAVE been going up in proportion to productivity since 1973.
The "Wtf happened in 1971?" meme is the poster child for being skeptical of mono causal explanations for complex issues. There have been a ton of other events since 1971 that are likely major contributors. In addition to the things you pointed out, 1972 is the year that Nixon went to China. Automation has replaced a lot of workers. The size of the workforce increased dramatically. We experienced the dawn of the information age. All of those things are going to contribute to stagnant or reduced real wages. Especially for those at the bottom of the wage distribution who are going to be most vulnerable to offshoring and automation.
It was true for decades before the mid 70s when productivity and wages decoupled. The reason why isn't clear but there was certainly the expectation that wages would increase for half a century in the US.
His second figure[1] shows his argument is nonsense.
The slope of increases in productivity remains constant on most of the graph, it just is that a certain point, wages stop going up. That is, the computer revolution did not change that slope, at least not until 1995-2005 (possibly from the internet).
Until the 70's, increases in worker productivity from technology were given to the worker as pay. After the 70's, it appears they were given to management and shareholders.
I think the point they're making is that salaries should be higher, given the discrepancy between productivity and pay that started appearing in the 70s [0].
Why do you think wages haven't kept up with productivity?
The decoupling of wages from productivity started around 1971-1973, which is suspiciously close to the Nixon Shock and beginning of the 1970s inflation. In periods of inflation, firms with high bargaining power (notably monopolistic corporations, corporate executives, and right now, software engineers & quants) can extract the excess money floating around. Firms in highly competitive industries (notably restaurants, family farms, and ordinary workers) get undercut every time they try to raise prices. Therefore all the gains go to the rich.
You should re-read the article. We've seen an increase in productivity, but no matched increase in wages (a 75% increase in worker productivity in America from 1973 to 2016, while average pay rose by less than 50% and median pay by just over 10%).
As for the rest of your comment, you should look into the Lump of Labour fallacy[1].
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2020/01/17/debunking-the...
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