I think that's exactly what that shows. Real median income (2014 dollars) was 51,000 in 1986. Today, it's 53,000[0]. Wealth in the middle hasn't changed much, and all that GDP growth is being gobbled by the very top.
I was a private yacht chef for 6 years. With my skill set, I have a choice to do cooking for a couple people or work as chef in a restaurant where in the same amount of time I can cook for 50 to 100 people. The challenges are different, for example, in a restaurant there is a lot more space to work so the work is much more efficient.
Do I make fantastic food for a very limited amount of people or do I cook for a lot of people? Turns out, that yacht chefs make a lot more money and it's a fun job where the hardest part is having to catch dinner first.
I didn't make the rules and I'm just living in the system. I really enjoy both, it doesn't make much difference to me if I cook for a few or a lot, but whether I do depends on wealth distribution. Most crew on yachts are very talented so an engineer would instead of being engineer for a limited amount of people would be an engineer in a power plant or as one engineer I worked with if he want back to his former engineering job, as a rocket scientist. The captain instead of managing an handful or crew would be managing scores or hundreds of people in upper management somewhere.
There is so much wasted energy and talent serving the wealthiest of the wealthiest. A lot of these people are still miserable with all their wealth because there is always a person with a bigger boat. At the end of the day, Paul Allen is making the wealthiest people on earth miserable.
This is true and false. Software is great for creating value: a few smart people can change the world. But the distribution of that profit is greatly uneven (a "few smart people").
As automation kicks in, we will see more value created by fewer and fewer people, leaving everyone else behind. So even if the middle class doesn't go technically backwards, they still have to compete with Microsoft and Google millionaires for assets like housing. We are seeing that already in markets with lots of high tech employees.
That's definitely not true at all. Entrepreneurs typically take a small fraction of the pie they started.
Show me how much of the pie Bill Gates has kept from the total value Microsoft has created over nearly 40 years, including for public investors, the software industry, hardware industry, all global productivity gains related to Microsoft software, Microsoft employees, and so on (including all salaries paid out over 40 years by Microsoft).
Now let's do the same math for Elon Musk, Larry Page, Steve Jobs / Wozniak, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and so on.
Don't forget to quantify the benefits to consumers, including quality of life gains. What's Google's search engine worth to consumers? How much time does it save them? What kind of quality of life boost - even if small in per capita terms - has it provided to over a billion people?
