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Perhaps people are at the point of revolt over the ever widening productivity vs pay gap? https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/product

Perhaps people are at the point of revolt over the ever widening productivity vs pay gap? https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ Productivity kept on climbing and wages stagnated post ~1980 Time for the workers to reap some of that benefit.

fazfq 4y ago
It's supply and demand - the supply of workers has doubled the last decades while demand has remained roughly the same. I think it's a miracle that salaries are so high currently.
- ianai 4y ago
  This is actually contrary to Econ theory and empirical data. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394486 The trend is towards less immigration and thus lower demand for goods/services and lower supply of labor.
  - cma 4y ago
    I think he is mainly talking about woman entering the workforce since 1970ish, which massively increased the labor pool.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  Assuming that's true--and I'm not sure it is--mass retirement of baby boomers, which has already begun due to forced retirement during the pandemic, is going to absolutely decimate the labour supply, which has enormous knock-on effects (including a rise in inflation).
  - scruple 4y ago
    You can go back to the year 2000 and find Fox News and CNN talking heads warning us about the impending doom of baby boomers retiring and taking the economy with them. Any year now... What has actually transpired in the meantime has been record breaking bailouts, corporate handouts, and profits, while workers pay remains in stagnation and housing market inflation goes through the roof (because of slow development, IMO, attributed to NIMBYism, mixed with a nationwide inability to build densely or build public transportation infrastructure). edit/ And let's not forget, there have also been 2 disastrous, major wars, one of which inarguably never should have occurred.
    - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
      > You can go back to the year 2000 and find Fox News and CNN talking heads warning us about the impending doom of baby boomers retiring and taking the economy with them. Any year now... Yeah. And now it's happening. Back in 2000 the average baby boomer was 35-55, far from retirement age. The average baby boomer is now 55-75, and after COVID forced a ton of them out of the labour force, they're choosing not to come back. See, you can report about a thing that's likely to happen in the future before it actually happens, and in the intervening period, while it may not be happening, that doesn't mean the reporting is wrong. Or are you also one of those types that thinks the media was overblowing the whole global warming thing because they deigned to report about it before we saw some of the more dramatic and visible effects? Frankly, I don't know what you're going on about in the rest of your comment. I made no claim that baby boomers aging out of the workforce explains All The Things. I certainly didn't make the claim that it explains trends in the economy up to this point. My point is that it's now a major factor in the economy going forward and we can expect major changes as a consequence.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Any year now started in 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/04/amid-the-pandemic-a-rising-share-of-older-u-s-adults-are-now-retired/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/04/amid-the-pa...
s1k3 4y ago
I doubt it.
pastacacioepepe 4y ago
It could also be a generalized disillusion in the system. I believe what pushed americans through for generations was the american dream. No american believed to be poor, they were all simply "future millionaires". But what if people realized that it was only a delusion, that it can never be that everyone is rich, because then who would do the dirty jobs? There is no social pyramid without a base, this system is litterally designed to have a class of poor people forced to do shitty jobs to survive. If you take away the hope of a wealthy future, there are no reasons left to slave away your life on a corporate ladder.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  consider that small business people had done their daily things for thirty years, not been chatting on the Internet; many of those local biz people relied on walk-in customers, and many of those local biz people are part of the Boomer generation. Those people paid their bills and participated in the general economy. At the same time, corporate outsourcing reached epic proportions, with the associated transfer of power in the HR and Exec realms.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
WalterBright 4y ago
> Productivity kept on climbing and wages stagnated post ~1980 The growth of government sopped up the difference. Nothing the government does comes for free, and then there's all the additional costs of complying with regulations and doing all the paperwork.
- lambdaba 4y ago
  Does that go hand in hand with the growth in administrative work? I would think so.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  For the people who don't like my post, where does all the money come from that funds the government? Nothing is free.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Please stop being the highlight of zero sum thinking. Let's make up a hypothetical example. The government says you have to install a safety rail and the amortized cost is $1 a year. You: OMG, this is going to cost $100 over the next century, a huge loss, I am destroyed. Reality: Johnny doesn't fall of the equipment being coming paralyzed (costing you an immediate $200 in lawsuit and payout fees) and is able to produce economic product over the next few decades bringing in $400 to the economy. Net win for everyone. That's where the money comes from. Or would you rather be like Russia where you have a giant potential economy that outputs less than Italy and doesn't give a damned about corruption and has terrible quality of living standards/longevity?
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      Here ya go (not a hypothetical example): https://slate.com/business/2022/10/san-francisco-toilet-million-noe-valley-design-review.html https://slate.com/business/2022/10/san-francisco-toilet-mill... They beat out Seattle, that spent $250,000 on a portable toilet a few years ago. On my own street, the city water outfit installed a fire hydrant. It cost $10,000, including architectural drawings of the installation. When the crew came out to install the hydrant (the main water line runs under my property) I asked them if they'd seen the drawings. They said "what drawings?" They'd never seen nor talked to the engineer, nor had any idea there ever was one. I asked them what the hydrant cost. They said $2,000. They had a machine on the back of the truck that was able to dig the hole, drill the main, and clamp on the new hydrant in 15 minutes. This was 20 some years ago, back when $10,000 was real money. The IRS now requires any business that sends out payments to an individual of more than $600 per year now has to file 1099s. The threshold used to be $20,000. A lot of ebay-ers are in for a big surprise. Do you have receipts for what you paid for items you sold on ebay?
boole1854 4y ago
> https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ The history of that EPI report is useful to know. Early versions of it showed a large gap between rising productivity and stagnating employee compensation. Some critics then pointed out problems with the analysis [1]. The report performed an apples-to-oranges comparison of productivity of (A) all non-farm workers adjusted over time with a (B) GDP deflator-based inflation index compared with the compensation of (A) a limited subset of employees adjusted over time with a (B) CPI-based inflation index. A more useful comparison would use the same inflation index for both data sets and would exclude from the productivity measure the workers that are also excluded from the compensation measure. When this is done, the growth in productivity and pay rise and nearly in lockstep, thus effectively refuting the majority of the point that the original report was trying to make. Since then, the EPI report has been updated to be more nuanced, which can be especially seen when one expands the 'click here for more...' sections. The new conclusion from the report is that productivity and compensation increases have been increasing primarily for a subset of workers while a broad subset of workers have not seen large productivity and compensation growth. This is true (as far as I can tell), but it's also a different story with different policy implications than the original story which implied diverging productivity and pay within the same set of workers. [1] https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/workers-compensation-growing-along-productivity https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/workers-compe...

fazfq 4y ago

It's supply and demand - the supply of workers has doubled the last decades while demand has remained roughly the same. I think it's a miracle that salaries are so high currently.

ianai 4y ago
This is actually contrary to Econ theory and empirical data. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394486 The trend is towards less immigration and thus lower demand for goods/services and lower supply of labor.
- cma 4y ago
  I think he is mainly talking about woman entering the workforce since 1970ish, which massively increased the labor pool.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
Assuming that's true--and I'm not sure it is--mass retirement of baby boomers, which has already begun due to forced retirement during the pandemic, is going to absolutely decimate the labour supply, which has enormous knock-on effects (including a rise in inflation).
- scruple 4y ago
  You can go back to the year 2000 and find Fox News and CNN talking heads warning us about the impending doom of baby boomers retiring and taking the economy with them. Any year now... What has actually transpired in the meantime has been record breaking bailouts, corporate handouts, and profits, while workers pay remains in stagnation and housing market inflation goes through the roof (because of slow development, IMO, attributed to NIMBYism, mixed with a nationwide inability to build densely or build public transportation infrastructure). edit/ And let's not forget, there have also been 2 disastrous, major wars, one of which inarguably never should have occurred.
  - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
    > You can go back to the year 2000 and find Fox News and CNN talking heads warning us about the impending doom of baby boomers retiring and taking the economy with them. Any year now... Yeah. And now it's happening. Back in 2000 the average baby boomer was 35-55, far from retirement age. The average baby boomer is now 55-75, and after COVID forced a ton of them out of the labour force, they're choosing not to come back. See, you can report about a thing that's likely to happen in the future before it actually happens, and in the intervening period, while it may not be happening, that doesn't mean the reporting is wrong. Or are you also one of those types that thinks the media was overblowing the whole global warming thing because they deigned to report about it before we saw some of the more dramatic and visible effects? Frankly, I don't know what you're going on about in the rest of your comment. I made no claim that baby boomers aging out of the workforce explains All The Things. I certainly didn't make the claim that it explains trends in the economy up to this point. My point is that it's now a major factor in the economy going forward and we can expect major changes as a consequence.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Any year now started in 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/04/amid-the-pandemic-a-rising-share-of-older-u-s-adults-are-now-retired/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/04/amid-the-pa...

s1k3 4y ago

I doubt it.

pastacacioepepe 4y ago

It could also be a generalized disillusion in the system. I believe what pushed americans through for generations was the american dream. No american believed to be poor, they were all simply "future millionaires". But what if people realized that it was only a delusion, that it can never be that everyone is rich, because then who would do the dirty jobs? There is no social pyramid without a base, this system is litterally designed to have a class of poor people forced to do shitty jobs to survive. If you take away the hope of a wealthy future, there are no reasons left to slave away your life on a corporate ladder.

mistrial9 4y ago
consider that small business people had done their daily things for thirty years, not been chatting on the Internet; many of those local biz people relied on walk-in customers, and many of those local biz people are part of the Boomer generation. Those people paid their bills and participated in the general economy. At the same time, corporate outsourcing reached epic proportions, with the associated transfer of power in the HR and Exec realms.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

WalterBright 4y ago

> Productivity kept on climbing and wages stagnated post ~1980 The growth of government sopped up the difference. Nothing the government does comes for free, and then there's all the additional costs of complying with regulations and doing all the paperwork.

lambdaba 4y ago
Does that go hand in hand with the growth in administrative work? I would think so.
WalterBright 4y ago
For the people who don't like my post, where does all the money come from that funds the government? Nothing is free.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Please stop being the highlight of zero sum thinking. Let's make up a hypothetical example. The government says you have to install a safety rail and the amortized cost is $1 a year. You: OMG, this is going to cost $100 over the next century, a huge loss, I am destroyed. Reality: Johnny doesn't fall of the equipment being coming paralyzed (costing you an immediate $200 in lawsuit and payout fees) and is able to produce economic product over the next few decades bringing in $400 to the economy. Net win for everyone. That's where the money comes from. Or would you rather be like Russia where you have a giant potential economy that outputs less than Italy and doesn't give a damned about corruption and has terrible quality of living standards/longevity?
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Here ya go (not a hypothetical example): https://slate.com/business/2022/10/san-francisco-toilet-million-noe-valley-design-review.html https://slate.com/business/2022/10/san-francisco-toilet-mill... They beat out Seattle, that spent $250,000 on a portable toilet a few years ago. On my own street, the city water outfit installed a fire hydrant. It cost $10,000, including architectural drawings of the installation. When the crew came out to install the hydrant (the main water line runs under my property) I asked them if they'd seen the drawings. They said "what drawings?" They'd never seen nor talked to the engineer, nor had any idea there ever was one. I asked them what the hydrant cost. They said $2,000. They had a machine on the back of the truck that was able to dig the hole, drill the main, and clamp on the new hydrant in 15 minutes. This was 20 some years ago, back when $10,000 was real money. The IRS now requires any business that sends out payments to an individual of more than $600 per year now has to file 1099s. The threshold used to be $20,000. A lot of ebay-ers are in for a big surprise. Do you have receipts for what you paid for items you sold on ebay?

boole1854 4y ago

> https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ The history of that EPI report is useful to know. Early versions of it showed a large gap between rising productivity and stagnating employee compensation. Some critics then pointed out problems with the analysis [1]. The report performed an apples-to-oranges comparison of productivity of (A) all non-farm workers adjusted over time with a (B) GDP deflator-based inflation index compared with the compensation of (A) a limited subset of employees adjusted over time with a (B) CPI-based inflation index. A more useful comparison would use the same inflation index for both data sets and would exclude from the productivity measure the workers that are also excluded from the compensation measure. When this is done, the growth in productivity and pay rise and nearly in lockstep, thus effectively refuting the majority of the point that the original report was trying to make. Since then, the EPI report has been updated to be more nuanced, which can be especially seen when one expands the 'click here for more...' sections. The new conclusion from the report is that productivity and compensation increases have been increasing primarily for a subset of workers while a broad subset of workers have not seen large productivity and compensation growth. This is true (as far as I can tell), but it's also a different story with different policy implications than the original story which implied diverging productivity and pay within the same set of workers. [1] https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/workers-compensation-growing-along-productivity https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/workers-compe...