I think everyone’s seen the famous graph from the Economic Policy Institute, that show that while Productivity has been growing in a steady and linear fashion decades after decades, wage began to stagnate in the 70s.
Since the 70s, wage have grown about +0.6% per year, while productivity has grown at an average of 1.4% per year. That gap is enormous and it is compounding over time.
Can someone me why it’s happened?
In: Economics
Productivity isnt an even growth.
The person who used to put the bolts on the tire in the 70s is a robot arm. The manual jobs that are left have seen productivity boosts based on automation that happened around them.
Same thing with tech: Sears had a catalog, you mailed in your order they mailed it back… No more printing, no more mailing, and the company is called amazon now… Less workers to deliver the same item…
I would argue that the gains for the workers who remain (in factories and warehouses) arent more profxucgive than they were 30-40 years ago… the gains have come from tech removing lots of other jobs from the chain. (the work product of one person does the job of dozens)
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