Yet, if you look at real wages over time, they're stagnating in pretty much every developed country. Productivity has gone up consistently while wages lag far behind. Where is all that value going to? Because it isn't certainly being left on the table.
> Productivity has gone up consistently while wages lag far behind.
This isn't true for the US. The chart that purports to show this is misleading. Essentially, there are problems with the usual chart: the two lines are indexed to different inflation measures, and the wages line excludes certain highly compensated occupations which have been experiencing significant earnings growth (probably because these occupations are where the productivity growth is happening).
> if you look at real wages over time, they're stagnating in pretty much every developed country.
If you look at real incomes over time, they've been stagnant since the dawn of time; or at least as far back as we have kept track.
There was once wage growth because wages started from zero. It wasn't that many years ago that people didn't sell labor, only things. As we have transitioned into a labor economy, wages started to become a larger portion of one's income. To the point that nowadays more or less 100% of the average person's income is from wages.
So, with incomes and wages now being effectively equivalent, there is no room for wages to grow further. To do that now, incomes would also need to rise, and that has never happened.
This doesn't make any sense to me. Wages have steadily raised at the same rate of productivity between the end of WWII and the 1970s. People started selling their labor centuries before that.
It started to some degree centuries before, but it was a slow road to see people fully embrace the new world. However, by the 1970s, nearly everyone was working for wages. The rate of self-employment has remained effectively stagnant since then. This period marks, for all intents and purposes, the limit of human labor productivity.
Productivity has continued to rise since, but on the back of automation, not as a result of humans becoming even more productive laborers.
