competition sure is a pain

When you undermine unions but nonetheless allow industry after industry after industry to become narrow cartels, the ensuing lack of competition and translates into rewards for a very small number of individuals: some lucky few from outside the ranks of the rich, but mostly old money.
Equity requires either vigorous support of organized labor to counterbalance the soclial ills of cartels, or viorous dismantling of the cartels.

Well, not quite, because this graph doesn't account for the international competition you are talking about. Make a graph that shows productivity vs. income for different nations, then we can talk.

You act like this is a bug in capitalism rather than a (rather fundamental) feature. Which is why CAPITALISM FUCK YEAH BEST SYSTEM EVER arguments don't resonate with me.

@3 If we're going to include that, the graph should also reflect the protections offered by social-democratic countries vs. the shredded-and-rotting-fast "safety net" poor people in the U.S. are left with.

And yet, nobody ever does anything about it except complain.

If I was a big corporate bigwig I'd tune you all out as well. All bark, no bite.

@4 Does the red line in a vacuum speak to you at all? That is a serious increase in quality of life. Obviously, it is an incredibly debatable point, but a good case can be made that capitalism does a lot to create both the increase in wealth AND the increase in wealth disparity.
This can be seen not as a graph of "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" but a graph of "the rich get richer and the poor get richer, only slower". I'm not sure that is a terrible thing for the world.

You are overlooking the fact that nearly all of these increases in productivity are the result of investments in better equipment by the investor class.

They are the ones that buy all the automated equipment that can be operated by one man instead of six, all the computers, the internet, and everything we enjoy that enables us to get more done. Working people are not working harder, investors are investing wiser -- so of course they should get the riches. It's called plutocracy, and it's the way of the world. Better get used to it.

Basically, for those of you who are unaware of how capitalism has functioned for so long - the profits are normally split approx. 50/50 between Labor and Capital investment.

When it gets out of whack, like now, with an 80/20 split (similar to Roaring 20s), bad things happen or we end up putting up guillotines in public squares.

No matter how much pepper spray they have.

@3 that's a myth. Income is not equally distributed within nations. Never has been.

As others have said, you can't compare against people doing similar work a generation or two back in the USA, you have to compare against people doing the same work right now in India and China. And, guess what, they aren't making twice the salary you are making. They aren't even making the same deflated salary you are making. Yet.

Problem is, even though a person's productivity may be double, triple, or even five times that of a chinese laborer, a corporation can pay the chinese laborer one-tenth the wage.

As the labor market increases exponentially, our own salaries (and social fabric) will disintegrate.

That's only what your paycheck "should" be if you are willing to give up all your benefits. The wage statistic does not include non-wage compensation such as medical coverage, which has grown from basicly nothing at the start of your graph to a significant fraction to total compensation today.

There are government statistics that track total compensation instead of just wage compensation. If you look at compensation as a share of GDP, you'll see that workers would actually have to take about a 4% cut in compensation to get back to where we were in 1950, and would only get about a 7% increase if we were to go back to their peak share in the 1970s.

There is actually another problem with your graph, too. Productivity is a per hour worked measurement but total wages are not. If your productivity doubles but you only work half as many hours, you should expect your paycheck to remain the same, not double. This is likely a less significant problem than the first one, because typical hours worked have not changed nearly as much as benefit costs over the graphed time.

In any case, compensation as a share of GDP is the statistic for real wonks, on both the left and the right. While has gone down slightly in the last few decades, it doesn't look nearly as dramatic as your misleading graph. Which is probably why your misleading graph is so popular on red-meat-for-leftists sites.

@10, the problem you're describing is much more serious than your vaguely smug exposition of it suggests. If "competing" on the global market means "competing" with the oppressed inhabitants of city sized slums, that doesn't leave much space for Americans to be anything but oppressed slum inhabitants themselves.

It won't end well.

@12, fine, you go ahead and embrace the complexity. I'm gonna stay over here with everyone who enjoys being pandered to.

Start your own business. It worked for me.

Wow! A widget to calculate twice my salary,

Maybe, just maybe anyone who cannot figure out 2x their current salary doesn't deserve more?

I'm sorry, but this is a deeply stupid post. I don't even know where to begin, so I won't.

Agree with most of the posters, this post lacks almost any critical thinking.

That productivity curve looks suspiciously similar to the presence of computers in the workplace.

Having better tools should not make a worker more money.

Honestly we live in utopia - we have magic boxes that almost anyone can afford that communicate with anyone on the planet, anywhere, anytime.

we have access to basically the entire human history of filmed or photographed entertainment; all available anywhere, anytime.

we have machines that can take us from one far corner of the country to the other farest corner of the country in less than half a day. It's a journey that used to take half a year.

violent crime and murder are essentially at an all time low in human history in the industrialized west.

even allowing for the general lack of access to advanced medical care; a vast majority of us can afford medical care that is better than the richest in the world received fifty years ago.

what the fuck more do we really want? wages aside, our lives our outright better than any previous generation.

So, you guys don't believe in technology? Is that what you're saying?

It's not like a guy using a push mower/sweeping scythe under the blazing sun is being asked to cut four times as much grass for the same money. Now he's cutting four times as much grass, riding a mower, listening to music and sucking a bevey. Welcome to progress.

Slog seems intent on bending any little data point to support a political ideology at any cost.

If you're wondering why you're underemployed, lacking benefits, and susceptible to replacement from foreign graduates – perhaps the net yield of your dim-wittedness, lack of reasoned judgement, and susceptibility to distraction from bright, shiny pieces of data.

Suckers.

How much of this increase in productivity is the result of automation? Having one person and one machine producing output that used to take ten people and no machine, you end up with exactly this same kind of disparity.

What paycheck?

You know...I've read the rebuttals in comments...and I understand that in many ways are society has gotten so much better (would I want to be an African American in the "high % of GDP 1950s...?) but the original post somehow rings true to a person who was born in 1960.

My bellweather year for things financial was 1979.

During the 60s, although we were far from rich, and may have even seemed lower middle class, I felt like my family and people around us were on an upward trajectory. An economic escalator. It didn't matter, was the thinking, because we're all gonna be living on spaceships that are make from gold created in cyclotrons.

Then the brakes hit. Hamburger Helper ads. Fuel shortages. The wind went out of the middle classes sails.

By the time I entered the job market, sadly during a period of unemployment that dwarfs the current youth...1982, the Reagan Recession....there were no jobs.

Ever after that, even as I have made "good money" some years, I always felt I was chasing a moving target. The more I made, the more expensive the world, especially housing became...and of course, if you're a competitive person, you didn't just keep up with the Jones, you have to compete with the "1% percent". And fighting against escalators that turned into electromagnetic mass drivers is really hard if you're pedaling a bicycle!

Well, I will say one thing. Post 2007, even though times are tough. I actually feel that the mass drivers of the super entitled have come to grinding halt. That is raison d'etre for most of the Obama Administration...keeping their party alive for a few more years by handing them a dole from the public treasury. Still even that well is running dry.

So, should one gloat in the misery of others with larger bank accounts. Oh yes.

This is correct at least from the standpoint of wages being stagnant. Most families have become two-income households just to maintain the same or lower standard of living, i.e. middle class.

But productivity involves so much more. What about population growth, international competition, consumer prices, rising standard of living in poor countries, availability of raw materials, etc.? Productivity is only one factor in making a profit.

It would have been helpful to show some data on executive pay versus worker pay, as well as some data on the trend for dividends. If you conclude that corporations are more profitable due to increased productivity alone, and that workers aren't getting a piece of the action, then give us more than the accusation that the fat cats are keeping it for themselves.

Also, moving to two-income households as the norm is turning out to be a big decrease in our standard of living. How you choose to live your life, what makes you happy, what pace and level of stress you accept --those are all hard to put on a graph. You shouldn't have to be wealthy to have one partner stay home (the decent home you can actually afford!), raise the kids, cook healthy meals, and generally be a homemaker.

If you need to use the tool on this post to know what double your earnings would be, you are already paid too much.

Or we could be half as productive and employ twice as many people for the same amount of money. Just think if your work week was half as many hours what your life could be like.

I don't know about you, but the "job creators" aren't done squeezing me. They are about to fire a bunch of us where I work and transfer all the work we did to people who are already swamped. This trend isn't over, it NEVER ENDS.