Yes they are relevant, because fundamentals don't change. Human nature hasn't changed. Supply-and-demand is still in effect. A thing is still only worth what a

Yes they are relevant, because fundamentals don't change. Human nature hasn't changed. Supply-and-demand is still in effect. A thing is still only worth what another gives for it. And when you try to mess with these two rules, they don't go away, they just adapt to what's imposed. "Functional poverty" is, for most practical purposes, illegal in this country. Employers can't pay what a job is worth if that worth less than a given wage; ergo, economic fundamentals dictate commerce find an alternate solution which does match the supply-and-demand rule, which unsurprisingly often is manifest as either international outsourcing or robotics (loosely speaking). The "average" gets skewed because the lower end of the bell curve gets chopped off, and those chopped find themselves unemployed because it's illegal for them to earn what their skills warrant. Yeah "average" doesn't cut it any more, because someone tried to impose a new economic model and large segment of society is finding out the hard way it doesn't work. The demand is still there, but since it's illegal to supply that demand with human labor, the supply gets filled in other ways - ways which create more demand for high-end skills leaving the low end further behind. You can't violate these basic models without causing (or relocating) the very problems you're trying to solve.