Like every product price, the wages are very much proportional to the demand/supply balance. And the increased centralization and standardization is directly an

Like every product price, the wages are very much proportional to the demand/supply balance. And the increased centralization and standardization is directly and considerably reducing the demand. If you have 10 companies with roughly equivalent market share, you need 10 CEOs, 10 independent chains of command, 10 accountants, 10 lawyers, 10 IT guys and so on. Each of those people possesses some domain knowledge, is harder to replace, and can negotiate a relatively high salary. Now if you let them merge into 1 megacorp, you get 1 CEO with 2-3 VPs, a couple of accountants/lawyers/IT guys/middle managers, and the rest become corporate drones following predefined instructions. They are much easier to replace, so they get lower wages. Globally, you have increased the efficiency in terms of lowering absolute prices, but decreased everybody's living standard, because the median wage drop was even more dramatic. If you want to gauge the scale of the problem, just think how much of your own monthly spending goes to owner-operated businesses vs. 1000+-employee corporations vs. rent-like transactions (e.g. mortgage interest). There are also a bunch of very specific policies making this worse: * Low interest rate make capital cheap, enabling leveraged acquisitions. * Bailouts for inefficient corporations prevent smaller businesses from taking their place. * Non-existing enforcement of anti-trust laws is another huge thing. Good luck selling physical items online without going on Amazon. Good like surviving after Amazon deems your niche worthy of their time and knocks off your product with "Amazon Basics". Ditto for mobile apps, ditto for any niche captured by a Google product, that is often terrible, but free to the end user due to ads. A separate thing is the government-backed college loans, that drive the tuition prices to the point where it doesn't pay off, but is still required by most employers. These are big long-term problems that will shape the economic future for most of the currently economically active population, but to my surprise there is very little public discussion about them.