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People are misreading the conclusion - the Covid related drop is normal and matches previous episodes, but the massive overall drop since 2000 is not. The situ

People are misreading the conclusion - the Covid related drop is normal and matches previous episodes, but the massive overall drop since 2000 is not. The situation on the ground is unchanged - the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed, but the overall pie has grown massively around us.

dozerly 4mo ago
We have one of the worlds most prosperous economies, and half of the US is living in abject poverty while quality of life for everyone is decreasing.
- taeric 4mo ago
  I'm going to go on a limb and say half of the US is not living in abject poverty? Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend.
  - dheera 4mo ago
    If you have negative net worth and the bank's money, not yours, is buying your food and housing, you are in abject poverty, just that the system is propping up your survival for a while. A lot of the US looks like they're doing great but fits into the category above. Non-poverty would look like: * You make enough money to pay for your own food, housing, and transportation in full, with enough buffer for emergencies, without needing to borrow a cent * You make enough money to be on trajectory to save up to pay for your own food, housing, transportation, and medical expenses in retirement when you are physically unable to serve the workforce
    - jmye 4mo ago
      > You make enough money to pay for your own food, housing, and transportation in full, with enough buffer for emergencies, without needing to borrow a cent So you're saying I'm in poverty because I couldn't buy my house and my car outright? > and medical expenses in retirement You're saying I'm in poverty because I understand and intend to use Medicare? These are trivially poor definitions.
      - dheera 4mo ago
        Medicare is a different thing, the government should be providing medical care for everyone to begin with, regardless of what they make. My definition is if you need to borrow money to put a roof over your head, at the minimum renting, you're in poverty. There are huge chunks of the US population borrowing money to pay for rent. If your locality doesn't provide adequate public transit, then a car is a necessity, and the onus is now on the locality's economy to make sure everyone can access that; if your locality doesn't pay high enough to afford that car without borrowing money, then yes, you're in poverty. Alternatively, the locality can choose to provide adequate, safe public transit, and the bar of poverty would change. Most of the US doesn't think this way because they're delusional and have been conditioned to feed the financial system and pay for things with money they don't have.
      - ifyoubuildit 4mo ago
        > So you're saying I'm in poverty because I couldn't buy my house and my car outright? I think this isn't as unreasonable as it seems to everyone living it. It's like water to the fish. We are conditioned that everything should be fueled by more and more debt, and your dollars should constantly be devalued so you can't stop grinding. The little people can never be allowed to just work enough to accumulate what they need and then take it easy.
  - skulk 4mo ago
    > Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend. There is a pretty clear down-trend post-COVID here. https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2024-overall-financial-well-being.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...
  - digitaltrees 4mo ago
    I own a Medicaid home care agency in 13 states. We serve low income families and our caregivers, who earn $12-18hr which is higher than minimum wage, absolutely struggle. We have created food banks and housing assistance because even working people are a few sick days or one car repair away from homelessness. I would encourage you to go work with average Americans in average towns. The facts on the ground are stark and eroding.
    - logicchains 4mo ago
      >I own a Medicaid home care agency in 13 states. We serve low income families and our caregivers There's an extreme selection bias there. If you run an agency that works with low income families you're not going to see a representative sample of the overall population.
      - jancsika 4mo ago
        > There's an extreme selection bias there. Maybe. Unfortunately, what digitaltrees wrote here is ambiguous. It could also be read as this: Our caregivers serve low income families. Those caregivers, who are our employees, earn $12-18/hr which is above minimum wage. Our employees absolutely struggle. Our employees are the ones using food banks and housing assistance because many are one car repair away from homelessness. digitaltrees: which interpretation is correct?
        dmoy 4mo ago
        I think the latter interpretation is correct. As in digitaltrees runs a business that does not pay its employees a living wage, who then have to rely on food banks and housing assistance.
        digitaltrees 4mo ago
        We don’t set the Medicaid reimbursement rate so we have no control over wages either. We work to be very disciplined about unit economics and fixed costs so as much money goes to caregivers as possible but if Medicaid pays $22hr you can’t pay $20 because you won’t cover the payroll taxes, workers compensation insurance, or required clinical and other admin expenses.
  - jzb 4mo ago
    I think “abject poverty” is probably overstating the case a bit. I do think quality of life is trending downward given the fact that housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing while wages are stagnant or worse.
    - gruez 4mo ago
      >I do think quality of life is trending downward given the fact that housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing while wages are stagnant or worse. ??? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N Note this is already inflation adjusted, so "housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing" is already accounted for.
      - mynameisbilly 4mo ago
        That chart doesn't make the case you think it does. Real median household income rising can be explained by things like more dual earner households (more women working since the 70s), more hours worked, etc. The household income can rise while the wages can theoretically remain flat or even fall. The more relevant statistic is that median real wages have only grown by about 29% across 40+ years (~0.6% per year) Since 2000, medical care costs have risen by 121.3%, hospital services by 275%, college tuition and fees by 196%, compared to consumer goods by 86.1%. Things like TVs and electronics went way down in costs while the essentials have absolutely skyrocketed. The cheap stuff drags the average down. You need a lot more than a single graph to argue against the quality of life going down for Americans.
        gruez 4mo ago
        >That chart doesn't make the case you think it does. Real median household income rising [...] Where are you getting household income from? It clearly says "Personal Income"
        mynameisbilly 4mo ago
        You're right, I was mixing up the related charts. Still, this makes my case even stronger since personal controls for adding more earners to a household. If real median personal income only rose from ~$28k in 1974 to ~45$k today, that's a 60% increase. Median personal income rising by 0.9% every year over 50 years compared to healthcare rising by 3-4% every year since 2000 is not a gap you can ignore. Necessities grew at nearly 3 to 4x the income rate. So the case that quality of life is trending downward is still completely valid and shows why you can't just point at a single graph and say "see? line go up therefore quality of life fine"
  - mc32 4mo ago
    Mississippi, the poorest state, has similar median income to Germany. I’m pretty sure 50% of the people there are not in abject poverty.
    - atq2119 4mo ago
      This doesn't actually seem to be true based on a quick googling, i.e. Germany has somewhat higher median income. But in addition to the raw numbers, you have to keep in mind that they don't account for cost of living and that different countries account for various services differently, especially health care.
      - mc32 4mo ago
        Totally understand that; but it counters the assertion of “abject poverty”. Perhaps relative poverty is a better descriptor but abject poverty is someone living in cardboard tents by the riverbank. Regular poor is living in section eight housing or subsidized housing. I don’t think we have 50% of Mississippians living in abject poverty.
        officeplant 4mo ago
        As a gulf state resident, a whole lot of us live in shitty old shotgun houses that have been patched up hundreds of times just waiting for the next hurricane to wipe us out finally. I would assume this doesn't account for Germans having different healthcare costs which will aboslutely wreck the average American household with how fucked our system has become.
        mc32 4mo ago
        Do you believe about 50% of Mississippians live in abject poverty as put forth by GGP poster? The kind of poverty you saw in Dust Bowl era workers or Weimar era Germany or 3rd would today? Sure people may not be middle class but they are not in abject poverty where they steal chickens, shit on the street, sell their relatives into servitude and barely have two changes of clothing. At least I don’t think so. What those people live would be middle class for counties where there is lots of abject poverty. People watch too many influencers and lose track of reality -it’s not all Beverly Hills and Kardashians and Real Wives of X-town everywhere. That’s fantasyland.
  - olivierestsage 4mo ago
    Sorry but you’re smoking crack if you don’t think quality of life is deteriorating in the US. The anxiety and misery is literally palpable.
    - bongoman37 4mo ago
      [dead]
- micromacrofoot 4mo ago
  the top 1% have nearly as much income as the bottom 80% https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#quarter:146;series:Net%20worth;demographic:income;population:all;units:levels https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
  - gruez 4mo ago
    >the top 1% have nearly as much income as the bottom 80% >link for "Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989" income =/= wealth
    - digitaltrees 4mo ago
      I don’t think that makes the argument you think it does. Wealth concentration is even more extreme.
      - gruez 4mo ago
        The point is that his original claim is either incorrect, or is not supported by the source he cited.
        digitaltrees 4mo ago
        That doesn’t logically follow. If the claim is 1% control 80%. And the counter argument is wealth is different than income the implication is that wealth inequality is 1) lower than income inequality and 2) more important for some unspecified reason. But if wealth inequality is more extreme then that means 1% control GREATER than 80% of wealth. So point 1 is false. And point 2 is most likely irrelevant because greater concentration likely means whatever harm from one category would track the other category
      - porridgeraisin 4mo ago
        Bigger picture truths don't justify smaller picture lies.
    - 4mo ago
- gruez 4mo ago
  >and half of the US is living in abject poverty Source? All the ones I know of use questionable methodology like: "being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage".
  - Folcon 4mo ago
    Out of curiosity, what is your expected baseline of what the average person and family in the US should be able to afford?
    - gruez 4mo ago
      "should" is a pretty woolly concept. "should" we have to work at all? UBI proponents don't think so, and that apparently that has 45% support. What's hopefully obvious is that not being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage is a far cry from "abject poverty". https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/19/more-americans-oppose-than-favor-the-government-providing-a-universal-basic-income-for-all-adult-citizens/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/19/more-amer...
      - Folcon 4mo ago
        I mean fair, but not relevant? I'm asking you the question because a statement like 50% of [population] is making a claim to some notion of what they expect society to look like you introduced the benchmark "not being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage", though I would expect a modern day society that makes any claim to be wealthy to be able to have above 50% of it's population to be able to support something like that as that would indicate they can support a small family You're saying that's not a good benchmark, so I'm trying to understand: 1) Do you have a different benchmark? 2) Is your key complaint that being unable to own a 2 bedroom house doesn't mean that individual or family is in "abject poverty"? In which case fair, though I would ask what does mean abject poverty for you? It seems like you're saying 2, but I want to be sure
        gruez 4mo ago
- vdqtp3 4mo ago
  > half of the US is living in abject poverty Anyone who believes this has absolutely no concept of what abject poverty looks like.
  - idiotsecant 4mo ago
    This is quickly going to devolve into 'nobody suffers unless their suffering as at least as bad as the worst suffering that exists', so let's just go ahead and get that out of the way and move on to something less pointless.
    - scottyah 4mo ago
      Have you looked up the definition of abject poverty? It is "the most severe and hopeless form of human deprivation". It's the subject of the conversation, how is that pointless?
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      - win311fwg 4mo ago
        While you are able to look up someone's definition of abject poverty, the only definition that is relevant in this context is the one held by the author of the earlier comment. It is unlikely you can look up his definition (before he replies to those who have asked for the definition in force).
        jmye 4mo ago
        > the only definition that is relevant in this context is the one held by the author of the earlier comment. This is absolute nonsense. We use common language to refer to common things in understandable ways in order to communicate with each other. You don't get to just handwave baldly incorrect statements as "well maybe he just has a different personal definition" without basically rendering literally all conversation moot and pointless. "Yeah, I know he said 2+2 is 5, but you don't know he defines 5" is just as patently silly.
- sfdlkj3jk342a 4mo ago
  What's your definition of "abject poverty"? I find it hard to believe that half the US would meet the criteria for any reasonable definition.
- zer00eyz 4mo ago
  > half of the US is living in abject poverty while quality of life for everyone is decreasing. The 350 million Americans looking at the top of the US economy and crying need to turn around and take a look at what's behind them. There are something like 7 billion people behind them, worse off.
  - Avicebron 4mo ago
    This isn't relevant to this discussion. You're welcome to go complain on a message board in Mumbai about wages in the US.
    - logicchains 4mo ago
      It absolutely is relevant to the discussion. Many Americans are ungrateful and envious of the Americans wealthier than them, in spite of the fact that their own living standards are still far far better than the majority of humans on the planet. And some of those hypocritically think that the wealth of richer Americans belong to them, but would never consider giving their own wealth to people across the globe who are poorer than them.
      - scottyah 4mo ago
        The people who want money from people richer than them never want to give up their own to the people who look to them with the same eyes.
        jodrellblank 4mo ago
        That is a false claim. Voting for taxation to support the less wealthy is almost a defining feature of what it means to be 'left'. Voting for taxation to support international aid and outreach and healthcare is very common. The 'left' supporting colonial- and war reparation payments is common. Donating money to charity, tithing, nationally and internationally is common across the board. > "from people richer than them" You may want to spend some time reflecting on where that money came from. How much lobbying and market manipulation, employee abuse, bullying, exploitation, wage theft, government (taxpayer-funded) grants and infusions of cash, bribery, corruption, dark patterns, law-breaking were involved, and how much tax avoidance and evasion was involved.
- Avicebron 4mo ago
  It's amazing how few people are willing to admit there is a problem. Spend 45 minutes driving around the state I live in talking to random people and it's painfuly obvious this is reality that some. I suppose it's mostly epstein sympathizers who are pushing the narrative that everything is perfect and nothing needs to be done.
- Fernicia 4mo ago
  [Citation needed]
  - win311fwg 4mo ago
    dozerly. "We have one of the worlds most prosperous economies, and half of the US is living in abject poverty while quality of life for everyone is decreasing." Hacker News, 30 Jun. 2026, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734916
- legitster 4mo ago
  "Abject poverty" is currently defined as living on less that $3 a day and dealing with things like chronic hunger and exposure. The best approximation would be the homeless population in the US (about 500k people), but even then most homeless would not even qualify. "Half" is a gross exaggeration.
  - digitaltrees 4mo ago
    The homeless number under estimates people with unstable housing that aren’t on the streets. I assure you that when your basic housing and nutrition are uncertain and missing even a few days of income will result in cascading effects of hunger and homelessness, the underlying stress is overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be this way, we don’t let bullies steal all the toys on the playground and destroy the very ecosystem that they want to have fun in, why are we letting capital accumulate in the hands of the most effective capitalists at the risk of destroying the very markets that let them succeed. I say that as a capitalist, if we lose the system because we allow unchecked Monopoly and wealth concentration, we won’t get it back.
    - legitster 4mo ago
      I agree with all those things, but if we start making up numbers and definitions we're at risk of undoing actual progress. Maybe it feels good to say "actually everyone is a victim of capitalism", but it muddies real necessary work when it comes to determining whether to prioritize how resources need to be allocated between a disabled person living on the streets vs a graduate student who is currently just a little underwater on their credit card payments.
      - digitaltrees 4mo ago
        That’s a reasonable perspective. I would ask though, whether the fear of muddying the discussion is weaponized to create the impression of complexity, a broad range of intractable causes that lead to the conclusion that any solution is futile. The forces that benefit from the status quo deploy this quite effectively
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- dismalaf 4mo ago
  The poverty rate in the US is 10%. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-287.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...
  - marcusverus 4mo ago
    It's actually far better than that! When people hear "poverty rate", they think "the percentage of people living in poverty". That's not what the census data on poverty is reporting, though. The census data is based on income only. It excludes in-kind welfare (Food Stamps, HUD, and Medicaid) and even excludes some welfare that is paid out in cash (like refundable tax credits). In other words, the census data is reporting that 10% of Americans earn under the poverty line. The number living under the poverty line is far, far lower.
- jandrewrogers 4mo ago
  The BLS and Federal Reserve both have data showing that the median American household has >$1,000 left over every month after all ordinary expenses, including housing, healthcare, and iPhones. Any definition of "abject poverty" that includes a comfortable lifestyle and $12-15k excess income every year is not a serious definition.
- dcrazy 4mo ago
  Can you define “abject poverty”?
- marcusverus 4mo ago
  The United States doles out >$30K/year in welfare spending for each person (not household, each person) under the poverty line. And that's just HUD/SNAP/Medicaid. The idea that any significant portion of the US is living in "abject poverty" (let alone half!) is hysterical in every sense of the word.
- bongoman37 4mo ago
  [dead]
colechristensen 4mo ago
It's just rent. Rent for the homes we live in (including "rent" as mortgage payments to the bank) Rent passed through as costs to the consumer for the businesses we patronize. We're stuck at home more affording to be able to do less so the people who own don't have to work.
- imightbebatman 4mo ago
  I have a similar PoV. I think rent seeking without sufficient checks is one of the biggest problems in our economy. But the underlying problem that people aren't paid enough is still true. Outside a few fields, most people are underpaid. It's even more stark when measured against productivity increases during the same time periods. That wealth went somewhere. It wasn't to most people. People have a tendency to get upset when they realize these kinds of things.
  - Ekaros 4mo ago
    From outside it doesn't look like not being paid enough. It looks like affordability problem. Prices in general are too high. Rents in general are part of this. Both for housing and commercial property. Somehow getting profit from both rent and appreciation is the goal of the system. Well that is what population voted for and choose not to overthrow system for so maybe they deserve it.
    - mancerayder 4mo ago
      Underlying rent are other things going up - property taxes, input costs like labor and materials, and insurance. While we must be mindful of greed and abuse, we need to include all underlying costs before just assuming people are cranking up rents. I'm not a landlord but I own property and the costs are gotten vicious lately. Labor is expensive, materials are insane, energy costs, and now insurance are suffocating. And in states with high property taxes, watch out.
      - Ekaros 4mo ago
        Energy is one variable. But have things gotten less efficient as things keep going up in prices? Is more labour needed to produce the same? There is stuff like regulation forcing more expensive things. But in general if there was efficiency gains things should keep the same price or drop. Somehow this isn't really happening very well. But my thesis really is that these things are not underlying the rents. But rents are actually underlying these costs. And well in general the rent seeking economic process build on ever growing valuations of everything.
guptadagger 4mo ago
>the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed im not really understanding what you mean. i dont get how labor is generated, in particular. do you mean to say the amount of total hours dedicated to labor per person or something else?
- gruez 4mo ago
  Probably to referring to hours worked, eg. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP
  - rsalus 4mo ago
    no, he's almost certainly referring to labor productivity. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB
- rsalus 4mo ago
  he's referring to labor productivity, e.g., the economic value produced per unit of labor input. it also _has_ changed significantly, as seen here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB however, unit labor costs has also been increasing (although they remain variable): https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2026/productivity-up-0-3-percent-in-first-quarter-2026.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2026/productivity-up-0-3-percen...
vannevar 4mo ago
This is consistent with the observation that the top 10% have captured a disproportionate share of GDP growth over the past few decades. https://equitablegrowth.org/new-data-reveal-how-u-s-economic-growth-is-divided/ https://equitablegrowth.org/new-data-reveal-how-u-s-economic... "The past three economic expansions have largely benefitted the top 10 percent. In each, the top decile received between 47 percent and 59 percent of all income growth in the expansion."
- u1hcw9nx 4mo ago
  Also note: Labor share has declined similarly across OECD countries for several decades. Automation, robots, software etc. they are all capital share.
  - stymaar 4mo ago
    > Automation, robots, software etc. they are all capital share. I highly doubt automation and robots are a meaningful factor here, but IP and outsourcing have the exact same as automation.
    - boelboel 4mo ago
      New factories use very few people, part of the reason why it's difficult for many countries to industrialize like South Korea or China did (climbing manufacturing ladder).
      - stymaar 4mo ago
        > New factories use very few people That's both true and false. Yes they need very few people to operate, but building and maintaining still need a lot of people.
        jjk166 4mo ago
        They need fewer people to build and to maintain than older ones did. Further the jobs from building the factory are temporary.
BoppreH 4mo ago
> The situation on the ground is unchanged - the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed, but the overall pie has grown massively around us. My understanding is that "fixed" costs like rent and groceries have gone up and taken more of people's budgets, while wages failed to catch up with this inflation. If that's the case, it's markedly different from "situation on the ground is unchanged". I don't know how the overall pie is doing, but it has not grown enough to compensate for the labor share drops shown in the article. The slice on my plate is certainly lighter.
CGMthrowaway 4mo ago
>the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed, but the overall pie has grown massively around us I don't see where the article made that claim. Are you making it yourself and can you support it? That sounds like something that would happen when technology improves. What the article does do, is pose a question that it never answers: "When the labor share falls, it means that productivity, prices, or both [which?] are growing faster than wages."
- legitster 4mo ago
  The Fed tracks this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=tjto https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=tjto Unit cost on labor has increased at a more or less steady pace this whole time. Ergo, it's not so much that labor is decreasing as other things are increasing faster. It's hard to argue that technology is increasing labor productivity an order of magnitude faster than it was in the 50s. It's more likely something else in the dataset (returns on capital/rent) is exploding in value.
  - CGMthrowaway 4mo ago
    Is "unit cost on labor" the same as "the amount of labor being generated per person"? I don't believe it is, especially so in the context of the article's question which I raised.
rsalus 4mo ago
> amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed not true, labor productivity has been steadily increasing: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB workers are simply capturing less of the economic value generated by their labor.
- bko 4mo ago
  Chart goes up, but you really need to look at percent change. Over the last 25 years it's averaged about 2% observation_date OPHNFB_PC1 2000-01-01 2.99256 2001-01-01 2.58092 2002-01-01 4.27146 2003-01-01 3.68422 2004-01-01 2.97991 2005-01-01 2.18582 2006-01-01 0.99665 2007-01-01 1.58927 2008-01-01 1.30737 2009-01-01 4.07061 2010-01-01 3.15513 2011-01-01 -0.02491 2012-01-01 0.93870 2013-01-01 0.59941 2014-01-01 1.00795 2015-01-01 1.27023 2016-01-01 0.61567 2017-01-01 1.49513 2018-01-01 1.40965 2019-01-01 2.13337 2020-01-01 5.30657 2021-01-01 2.06281 2022-01-01 -1.46786 2023-01-01 2.13277 2024-01-01 2.91010 2025-01-01 2.25154
  - rsalus 4mo ago
    2% is average. 1-1.5% is considered a slump, while anything over 2.5% is considered a boom. for instance, the post-ww2 boom (1947-1972) averaged 2.9%. at that rate of growth, a country's total output per worker doubles in roughly ~25 years.
  - ijidak 4mo ago
    Is this inflation adjusted?
- zer00eyz 4mo ago
  The chart you're showing, absolutely reflects the reality of some of the most productive segments of our economy. Ford now makes more cars, with fewer people. Sears used to have people who took photos, laid out catalogs, opened envelopes (with checks in them).... Amazon has none of that. We replaced switch board operators, with mechanical, then digital switching. More calls routed, fewer people required. go back 45 years and "draftsmen" was a job - replaced by auto cad. All these industries have seen massive productivity. Are the people flipping burgers more productive? Plumbers? Welders? Teachers? Nurses? -- to some extent yes, because of technology but not to the same extent as the previous businesses. Anything that qualifies as "service economy" work has not seen the same gains as Ford (see: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/phenomenal-gains-in-manufacturing-productivity-2/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/phenomenal-gains-in-manufactu... )
coffeecantcode 4mo ago
Benn Jordan just released a new video proposing that we are not in “late stage capitalism” and instead we are currently an offshoot of capitalism called “leverageism”. In the video he describes how when people like Elon Musk get to the level of wealth that they are at, it becomes far more beneficial for them to take from (or stunt) the spending power of lower classes than it is to add to their own net worth dollar figure - simply put, the former moves the needle far more in their favor than the latter. Definitely explained the idea of our slice remaining the same while the overall pie around us is getting larger. *Edit: Benn not Ben
insane_dreamer 4mo ago
I don't know which people you're referring to, but the conclusion is pretty clear: the _share_ of the total pie captured by labor is shrinking. Productivity is increasing, but capital is capturing all, or almost all, the benefits of that increased productivity and economic growth. AI is going to further exacerbate this inequality. Time to re-read Capital In the 21st Century.
dismalaf 4mo ago
Since 2000 the biggest economic change is software. While most workers doing physical jobs have only made themselves slightly more efficient (or maybe mass immigration has maybe even reduced efficiency in some sectors), some workers (tech workers) have made themselves hundreds or thousands of times more efficient and captured the gains as equity (either in their own startup, their job, etc...). The positive is that growth overall has still lifted living the average living standard.
jameslk 4mo ago
That overall drop in share of income since 2000 is related to the "giant sucking sound" Ross Perot warned about in 1992: "It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care, that's the most expensive single element in making a car, have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south." While Perot was warning about NAFTA, the jobs did go elsewhere: China and other countries with cheaper labor. Globalization led to labor competition, which increased the supply of workers. Meanwhile, companies captured the value of the increased supply of workers. More cheap labor = more production, for a world that had latent demand for cheaper output. It ended up a net benefit for businesses (capital owners), and overseas workers. This is at least partially if not significantly where the growing gap between wage growth % and GDP growth % comes from. The macro economists were right that globalization would be more efficient overall for the world, economically. But that came at the expense of the US labor that saw its wage growth eroded as a consequence.

dozerly 4mo ago

We have one of the worlds most prosperous economies, and half of the US is living in abject poverty while quality of life for everyone is decreasing.

taeric 4mo ago
I'm going to go on a limb and say half of the US is not living in abject poverty? Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend.
- dheera 4mo ago
  If you have negative net worth and the bank's money, not yours, is buying your food and housing, you are in abject poverty, just that the system is propping up your survival for a while. A lot of the US looks like they're doing great but fits into the category above. Non-poverty would look like: * You make enough money to pay for your own food, housing, and transportation in full, with enough buffer for emergencies, without needing to borrow a cent * You make enough money to be on trajectory to save up to pay for your own food, housing, transportation, and medical expenses in retirement when you are physically unable to serve the workforce
  - jmye 4mo ago
    > You make enough money to pay for your own food, housing, and transportation in full, with enough buffer for emergencies, without needing to borrow a cent So you're saying I'm in poverty because I couldn't buy my house and my car outright? > and medical expenses in retirement You're saying I'm in poverty because I understand and intend to use Medicare? These are trivially poor definitions.
    - dheera 4mo ago
      Medicare is a different thing, the government should be providing medical care for everyone to begin with, regardless of what they make. My definition is if you need to borrow money to put a roof over your head, at the minimum renting, you're in poverty. There are huge chunks of the US population borrowing money to pay for rent. If your locality doesn't provide adequate public transit, then a car is a necessity, and the onus is now on the locality's economy to make sure everyone can access that; if your locality doesn't pay high enough to afford that car without borrowing money, then yes, you're in poverty. Alternatively, the locality can choose to provide adequate, safe public transit, and the bar of poverty would change. Most of the US doesn't think this way because they're delusional and have been conditioned to feed the financial system and pay for things with money they don't have.
    - ifyoubuildit 4mo ago
      > So you're saying I'm in poverty because I couldn't buy my house and my car outright? I think this isn't as unreasonable as it seems to everyone living it. It's like water to the fish. We are conditioned that everything should be fueled by more and more debt, and your dollars should constantly be devalued so you can't stop grinding. The little people can never be allowed to just work enough to accumulate what they need and then take it easy.
- skulk 4mo ago
  > Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend. There is a pretty clear down-trend post-COVID here. https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2024-overall-financial-well-being.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...
- digitaltrees 4mo ago
  I own a Medicaid home care agency in 13 states. We serve low income families and our caregivers, who earn $12-18hr which is higher than minimum wage, absolutely struggle. We have created food banks and housing assistance because even working people are a few sick days or one car repair away from homelessness. I would encourage you to go work with average Americans in average towns. The facts on the ground are stark and eroding.
  - logicchains 4mo ago
    >I own a Medicaid home care agency in 13 states. We serve low income families and our caregivers There's an extreme selection bias there. If you run an agency that works with low income families you're not going to see a representative sample of the overall population.
    - jancsika 4mo ago
      > There's an extreme selection bias there. Maybe. Unfortunately, what digitaltrees wrote here is ambiguous. It could also be read as this: Our caregivers serve low income families. Those caregivers, who are our employees, earn $12-18/hr which is above minimum wage. Our employees absolutely struggle. Our employees are the ones using food banks and housing assistance because many are one car repair away from homelessness. digitaltrees: which interpretation is correct?
      - dmoy 4mo ago
        I think the latter interpretation is correct. As in digitaltrees runs a business that does not pay its employees a living wage, who then have to rely on food banks and housing assistance.
        digitaltrees 4mo ago
        We don’t set the Medicaid reimbursement rate so we have no control over wages either. We work to be very disciplined about unit economics and fixed costs so as much money goes to caregivers as possible but if Medicaid pays $22hr you can’t pay $20 because you won’t cover the payroll taxes, workers compensation insurance, or required clinical and other admin expenses.
- jzb 4mo ago
  I think “abject poverty” is probably overstating the case a bit. I do think quality of life is trending downward given the fact that housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing while wages are stagnant or worse.
  - gruez 4mo ago
    >I do think quality of life is trending downward given the fact that housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing while wages are stagnant or worse. ??? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N Note this is already inflation adjusted, so "housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing" is already accounted for.
    - mynameisbilly 4mo ago
      That chart doesn't make the case you think it does. Real median household income rising can be explained by things like more dual earner households (more women working since the 70s), more hours worked, etc. The household income can rise while the wages can theoretically remain flat or even fall. The more relevant statistic is that median real wages have only grown by about 29% across 40+ years (~0.6% per year) Since 2000, medical care costs have risen by 121.3%, hospital services by 275%, college tuition and fees by 196%, compared to consumer goods by 86.1%. Things like TVs and electronics went way down in costs while the essentials have absolutely skyrocketed. The cheap stuff drags the average down. You need a lot more than a single graph to argue against the quality of life going down for Americans.
      - gruez 4mo ago
        >That chart doesn't make the case you think it does. Real median household income rising [...] Where are you getting household income from? It clearly says "Personal Income"
        mynameisbilly 4mo ago
        You're right, I was mixing up the related charts. Still, this makes my case even stronger since personal controls for adding more earners to a household. If real median personal income only rose from ~$28k in 1974 to ~45$k today, that's a 60% increase. Median personal income rising by 0.9% every year over 50 years compared to healthcare rising by 3-4% every year since 2000 is not a gap you can ignore. Necessities grew at nearly 3 to 4x the income rate. So the case that quality of life is trending downward is still completely valid and shows why you can't just point at a single graph and say "see? line go up therefore quality of life fine"
- mc32 4mo ago
  Mississippi, the poorest state, has similar median income to Germany. I’m pretty sure 50% of the people there are not in abject poverty.
  - atq2119 4mo ago
    This doesn't actually seem to be true based on a quick googling, i.e. Germany has somewhat higher median income. But in addition to the raw numbers, you have to keep in mind that they don't account for cost of living and that different countries account for various services differently, especially health care.
    - mc32 4mo ago
      Totally understand that; but it counters the assertion of “abject poverty”. Perhaps relative poverty is a better descriptor but abject poverty is someone living in cardboard tents by the riverbank. Regular poor is living in section eight housing or subsidized housing. I don’t think we have 50% of Mississippians living in abject poverty.
      - officeplant 4mo ago
        As a gulf state resident, a whole lot of us live in shitty old shotgun houses that have been patched up hundreds of times just waiting for the next hurricane to wipe us out finally. I would assume this doesn't account for Germans having different healthcare costs which will aboslutely wreck the average American household with how fucked our system has become.
        mc32 4mo ago
        Do you believe about 50% of Mississippians live in abject poverty as put forth by GGP poster? The kind of poverty you saw in Dust Bowl era workers or Weimar era Germany or 3rd would today? Sure people may not be middle class but they are not in abject poverty where they steal chickens, shit on the street, sell their relatives into servitude and barely have two changes of clothing. At least I don’t think so. What those people live would be middle class for counties where there is lots of abject poverty. People watch too many influencers and lose track of reality -it’s not all Beverly Hills and Kardashians and Real Wives of X-town everywhere. That’s fantasyland.
- olivierestsage 4mo ago
  Sorry but you’re smoking crack if you don’t think quality of life is deteriorating in the US. The anxiety and misery is literally palpable.
  - bongoman37 4mo ago
    [dead]
micromacrofoot 4mo ago
the top 1% have nearly as much income as the bottom 80% https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#quarter:146;series:Net%20worth;demographic:income;population:all;units:levels https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
- gruez 4mo ago
  >the top 1% have nearly as much income as the bottom 80% >link for "Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989" income =/= wealth
  - digitaltrees 4mo ago
    I don’t think that makes the argument you think it does. Wealth concentration is even more extreme.
    - gruez 4mo ago
      The point is that his original claim is either incorrect, or is not supported by the source he cited.
      - digitaltrees 4mo ago
        That doesn’t logically follow. If the claim is 1% control 80%. And the counter argument is wealth is different than income the implication is that wealth inequality is 1) lower than income inequality and 2) more important for some unspecified reason. But if wealth inequality is more extreme then that means 1% control GREATER than 80% of wealth. So point 1 is false. And point 2 is most likely irrelevant because greater concentration likely means whatever harm from one category would track the other category
    - porridgeraisin 4mo ago
      Bigger picture truths don't justify smaller picture lies.
  - 4mo ago
gruez 4mo ago
>and half of the US is living in abject poverty Source? All the ones I know of use questionable methodology like: "being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage".
- Folcon 4mo ago
  Out of curiosity, what is your expected baseline of what the average person and family in the US should be able to afford?
  - gruez 4mo ago
    "should" is a pretty woolly concept. "should" we have to work at all? UBI proponents don't think so, and that apparently that has 45% support. What's hopefully obvious is that not being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage is a far cry from "abject poverty". https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/19/more-americans-oppose-than-favor-the-government-providing-a-universal-basic-income-for-all-adult-citizens/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/19/more-amer...
    - Folcon 4mo ago
      I mean fair, but not relevant? I'm asking you the question because a statement like 50% of [population] is making a claim to some notion of what they expect society to look like you introduced the benchmark "not being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage", though I would expect a modern day society that makes any claim to be wealthy to be able to have above 50% of it's population to be able to support something like that as that would indicate they can support a small family You're saying that's not a good benchmark, so I'm trying to understand: 1) Do you have a different benchmark? 2) Is your key complaint that being unable to own a 2 bedroom house doesn't mean that individual or family is in "abject poverty"? In which case fair, though I would ask what does mean abject poverty for you? It seems like you're saying 2, but I want to be sure
      - gruez 4mo ago
vdqtp3 4mo ago
> half of the US is living in abject poverty Anyone who believes this has absolutely no concept of what abject poverty looks like.
- idiotsecant 4mo ago
  This is quickly going to devolve into 'nobody suffers unless their suffering as at least as bad as the worst suffering that exists', so let's just go ahead and get that out of the way and move on to something less pointless.
  - scottyah 4mo ago
    Have you looked up the definition of abject poverty? It is "the most severe and hopeless form of human deprivation". It's the subject of the conversation, how is that pointless?
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - win311fwg 4mo ago
      While you are able to look up someone's definition of abject poverty, the only definition that is relevant in this context is the one held by the author of the earlier comment. It is unlikely you can look up his definition (before he replies to those who have asked for the definition in force).
      - jmye 4mo ago
        > the only definition that is relevant in this context is the one held by the author of the earlier comment. This is absolute nonsense. We use common language to refer to common things in understandable ways in order to communicate with each other. You don't get to just handwave baldly incorrect statements as "well maybe he just has a different personal definition" without basically rendering literally all conversation moot and pointless. "Yeah, I know he said 2+2 is 5, but you don't know he defines 5" is just as patently silly.
sfdlkj3jk342a 4mo ago
What's your definition of "abject poverty"? I find it hard to believe that half the US would meet the criteria for any reasonable definition.
zer00eyz 4mo ago
> half of the US is living in abject poverty while quality of life for everyone is decreasing. The 350 million Americans looking at the top of the US economy and crying need to turn around and take a look at what's behind them. There are something like 7 billion people behind them, worse off.
- Avicebron 4mo ago
  This isn't relevant to this discussion. You're welcome to go complain on a message board in Mumbai about wages in the US.
  - logicchains 4mo ago
    It absolutely is relevant to the discussion. Many Americans are ungrateful and envious of the Americans wealthier than them, in spite of the fact that their own living standards are still far far better than the majority of humans on the planet. And some of those hypocritically think that the wealth of richer Americans belong to them, but would never consider giving their own wealth to people across the globe who are poorer than them.
    - scottyah 4mo ago
      The people who want money from people richer than them never want to give up their own to the people who look to them with the same eyes.
      - jodrellblank 4mo ago
        That is a false claim. Voting for taxation to support the less wealthy is almost a defining feature of what it means to be 'left'. Voting for taxation to support international aid and outreach and healthcare is very common. The 'left' supporting colonial- and war reparation payments is common. Donating money to charity, tithing, nationally and internationally is common across the board. > "from people richer than them" You may want to spend some time reflecting on where that money came from. How much lobbying and market manipulation, employee abuse, bullying, exploitation, wage theft, government (taxpayer-funded) grants and infusions of cash, bribery, corruption, dark patterns, law-breaking were involved, and how much tax avoidance and evasion was involved.
Avicebron 4mo ago
It's amazing how few people are willing to admit there is a problem. Spend 45 minutes driving around the state I live in talking to random people and it's painfuly obvious this is reality that some. I suppose it's mostly epstein sympathizers who are pushing the narrative that everything is perfect and nothing needs to be done.
Fernicia 4mo ago
[Citation needed]
- win311fwg 4mo ago
  dozerly. "We have one of the worlds most prosperous economies, and half of the US is living in abject poverty while quality of life for everyone is decreasing." Hacker News, 30 Jun. 2026, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734916
legitster 4mo ago
"Abject poverty" is currently defined as living on less that $3 a day and dealing with things like chronic hunger and exposure. The best approximation would be the homeless population in the US (about 500k people), but even then most homeless would not even qualify. "Half" is a gross exaggeration.
- digitaltrees 4mo ago
  The homeless number under estimates people with unstable housing that aren’t on the streets. I assure you that when your basic housing and nutrition are uncertain and missing even a few days of income will result in cascading effects of hunger and homelessness, the underlying stress is overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be this way, we don’t let bullies steal all the toys on the playground and destroy the very ecosystem that they want to have fun in, why are we letting capital accumulate in the hands of the most effective capitalists at the risk of destroying the very markets that let them succeed. I say that as a capitalist, if we lose the system because we allow unchecked Monopoly and wealth concentration, we won’t get it back.
  - legitster 4mo ago
    I agree with all those things, but if we start making up numbers and definitions we're at risk of undoing actual progress. Maybe it feels good to say "actually everyone is a victim of capitalism", but it muddies real necessary work when it comes to determining whether to prioritize how resources need to be allocated between a disabled person living on the streets vs a graduate student who is currently just a little underwater on their credit card payments.
    - digitaltrees 4mo ago
      That’s a reasonable perspective. I would ask though, whether the fear of muddying the discussion is weaponized to create the impression of complexity, a broad range of intractable causes that lead to the conclusion that any solution is futile. The forces that benefit from the status quo deploy this quite effectively
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
dismalaf 4mo ago
The poverty rate in the US is 10%. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-287.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...
- marcusverus 4mo ago
  It's actually far better than that! When people hear "poverty rate", they think "the percentage of people living in poverty". That's not what the census data on poverty is reporting, though. The census data is based on income only. It excludes in-kind welfare (Food Stamps, HUD, and Medicaid) and even excludes some welfare that is paid out in cash (like refundable tax credits). In other words, the census data is reporting that 10% of Americans earn under the poverty line. The number living under the poverty line is far, far lower.
jandrewrogers 4mo ago
The BLS and Federal Reserve both have data showing that the median American household has >$1,000 left over every month after all ordinary expenses, including housing, healthcare, and iPhones. Any definition of "abject poverty" that includes a comfortable lifestyle and $12-15k excess income every year is not a serious definition.
dcrazy 4mo ago
Can you define “abject poverty”?
marcusverus 4mo ago
The United States doles out >$30K/year in welfare spending for each person (not household, each person) under the poverty line. And that's just HUD/SNAP/Medicaid. The idea that any significant portion of the US is living in "abject poverty" (let alone half!) is hysterical in every sense of the word.
bongoman37 4mo ago
[dead]

colechristensen 4mo ago

It's just rent. Rent for the homes we live in (including "rent" as mortgage payments to the bank) Rent passed through as costs to the consumer for the businesses we patronize. We're stuck at home more affording to be able to do less so the people who own don't have to work.

imightbebatman 4mo ago
I have a similar PoV. I think rent seeking without sufficient checks is one of the biggest problems in our economy. But the underlying problem that people aren't paid enough is still true. Outside a few fields, most people are underpaid. It's even more stark when measured against productivity increases during the same time periods. That wealth went somewhere. It wasn't to most people. People have a tendency to get upset when they realize these kinds of things.
- Ekaros 4mo ago
  From outside it doesn't look like not being paid enough. It looks like affordability problem. Prices in general are too high. Rents in general are part of this. Both for housing and commercial property. Somehow getting profit from both rent and appreciation is the goal of the system. Well that is what population voted for and choose not to overthrow system for so maybe they deserve it.
  - mancerayder 4mo ago
    Underlying rent are other things going up - property taxes, input costs like labor and materials, and insurance. While we must be mindful of greed and abuse, we need to include all underlying costs before just assuming people are cranking up rents. I'm not a landlord but I own property and the costs are gotten vicious lately. Labor is expensive, materials are insane, energy costs, and now insurance are suffocating. And in states with high property taxes, watch out.
    - Ekaros 4mo ago
      Energy is one variable. But have things gotten less efficient as things keep going up in prices? Is more labour needed to produce the same? There is stuff like regulation forcing more expensive things. But in general if there was efficiency gains things should keep the same price or drop. Somehow this isn't really happening very well. But my thesis really is that these things are not underlying the rents. But rents are actually underlying these costs. And well in general the rent seeking economic process build on ever growing valuations of everything.

guptadagger 4mo ago

>the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed im not really understanding what you mean. i dont get how labor is generated, in particular. do you mean to say the amount of total hours dedicated to labor per person or something else?

gruez 4mo ago
Probably to referring to hours worked, eg. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP
- rsalus 4mo ago
  no, he's almost certainly referring to labor productivity. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB
rsalus 4mo ago
he's referring to labor productivity, e.g., the economic value produced per unit of labor input. it also _has_ changed significantly, as seen here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB however, unit labor costs has also been increasing (although they remain variable): https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2026/productivity-up-0-3-percent-in-first-quarter-2026.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2026/productivity-up-0-3-percen...

vannevar 4mo ago

This is consistent with the observation that the top 10% have captured a disproportionate share of GDP growth over the past few decades. https://equitablegrowth.org/new-data-reveal-how-u-s-economic-growth-is-divided/ https://equitablegrowth.org/new-data-reveal-how-u-s-economic... "The past three economic expansions have largely benefitted the top 10 percent. In each, the top decile received between 47 percent and 59 percent of all income growth in the expansion."

u1hcw9nx 4mo ago
Also note: Labor share has declined similarly across OECD countries for several decades. Automation, robots, software etc. they are all capital share.
- stymaar 4mo ago
  > Automation, robots, software etc. they are all capital share. I highly doubt automation and robots are a meaningful factor here, but IP and outsourcing have the exact same as automation.
  - boelboel 4mo ago
    New factories use very few people, part of the reason why it's difficult for many countries to industrialize like South Korea or China did (climbing manufacturing ladder).
    - stymaar 4mo ago
      > New factories use very few people That's both true and false. Yes they need very few people to operate, but building and maintaining still need a lot of people.
      - jjk166 4mo ago
        They need fewer people to build and to maintain than older ones did. Further the jobs from building the factory are temporary.

BoppreH 4mo ago

> The situation on the ground is unchanged - the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed, but the overall pie has grown massively around us. My understanding is that "fixed" costs like rent and groceries have gone up and taken more of people's budgets, while wages failed to catch up with this inflation. If that's the case, it's markedly different from "situation on the ground is unchanged". I don't know how the overall pie is doing, but it has not grown enough to compensate for the labor share drops shown in the article. The slice on my plate is certainly lighter.

CGMthrowaway 4mo ago

>the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed, but the overall pie has grown massively around us I don't see where the article made that claim. Are you making it yourself and can you support it? That sounds like something that would happen when technology improves. What the article does do, is pose a question that it never answers: "When the labor share falls, it means that productivity, prices, or both [which?] are growing faster than wages."

legitster 4mo ago
The Fed tracks this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=tjto https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=tjto Unit cost on labor has increased at a more or less steady pace this whole time. Ergo, it's not so much that labor is decreasing as other things are increasing faster. It's hard to argue that technology is increasing labor productivity an order of magnitude faster than it was in the 50s. It's more likely something else in the dataset (returns on capital/rent) is exploding in value.
- CGMthrowaway 4mo ago
  Is "unit cost on labor" the same as "the amount of labor being generated per person"? I don't believe it is, especially so in the context of the article's question which I raised.

rsalus 4mo ago

> amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed not true, labor productivity has been steadily increasing: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB workers are simply capturing less of the economic value generated by their labor.

bko 4mo ago
Chart goes up, but you really need to look at percent change. Over the last 25 years it's averaged about 2% observation_date OPHNFB_PC1 2000-01-01 2.99256 2001-01-01 2.58092 2002-01-01 4.27146 2003-01-01 3.68422 2004-01-01 2.97991 2005-01-01 2.18582 2006-01-01 0.99665 2007-01-01 1.58927 2008-01-01 1.30737 2009-01-01 4.07061 2010-01-01 3.15513 2011-01-01 -0.02491 2012-01-01 0.93870 2013-01-01 0.59941 2014-01-01 1.00795 2015-01-01 1.27023 2016-01-01 0.61567 2017-01-01 1.49513 2018-01-01 1.40965 2019-01-01 2.13337 2020-01-01 5.30657 2021-01-01 2.06281 2022-01-01 -1.46786 2023-01-01 2.13277 2024-01-01 2.91010 2025-01-01 2.25154
- rsalus 4mo ago
  2% is average. 1-1.5% is considered a slump, while anything over 2.5% is considered a boom. for instance, the post-ww2 boom (1947-1972) averaged 2.9%. at that rate of growth, a country's total output per worker doubles in roughly ~25 years.
- ijidak 4mo ago
  Is this inflation adjusted?
zer00eyz 4mo ago
The chart you're showing, absolutely reflects the reality of some of the most productive segments of our economy. Ford now makes more cars, with fewer people. Sears used to have people who took photos, laid out catalogs, opened envelopes (with checks in them).... Amazon has none of that. We replaced switch board operators, with mechanical, then digital switching. More calls routed, fewer people required. go back 45 years and "draftsmen" was a job - replaced by auto cad. All these industries have seen massive productivity. Are the people flipping burgers more productive? Plumbers? Welders? Teachers? Nurses? -- to some extent yes, because of technology but not to the same extent as the previous businesses. Anything that qualifies as "service economy" work has not seen the same gains as Ford (see: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/phenomenal-gains-in-manufacturing-productivity-2/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/phenomenal-gains-in-manufactu... )

coffeecantcode 4mo ago

Benn Jordan just released a new video proposing that we are not in “late stage capitalism” and instead we are currently an offshoot of capitalism called “leverageism”. In the video he describes how when people like Elon Musk get to the level of wealth that they are at, it becomes far more beneficial for them to take from (or stunt) the spending power of lower classes than it is to add to their own net worth dollar figure - simply put, the former moves the needle far more in their favor than the latter. Definitely explained the idea of our slice remaining the same while the overall pie around us is getting larger. *Edit: Benn not Ben

insane_dreamer 4mo ago

I don't know which people you're referring to, but the conclusion is pretty clear: the _share_ of the total pie captured by labor is shrinking. Productivity is increasing, but capital is capturing all, or almost all, the benefits of that increased productivity and economic growth. AI is going to further exacerbate this inequality. Time to re-read Capital In the 21st Century.

dismalaf 4mo ago

Since 2000 the biggest economic change is software. While most workers doing physical jobs have only made themselves slightly more efficient (or maybe mass immigration has maybe even reduced efficiency in some sectors), some workers (tech workers) have made themselves hundreds or thousands of times more efficient and captured the gains as equity (either in their own startup, their job, etc...). The positive is that growth overall has still lifted living the average living standard.

jameslk 4mo ago

That overall drop in share of income since 2000 is related to the "giant sucking sound" Ross Perot warned about in 1992: "It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care, that's the most expensive single element in making a car, have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south." While Perot was warning about NAFTA, the jobs did go elsewhere: China and other countries with cheaper labor. Globalization led to labor competition, which increased the supply of workers. Meanwhile, companies captured the value of the increased supply of workers. More cheap labor = more production, for a world that had latent demand for cheaper output. It ended up a net benefit for businesses (capital owners), and overseas workers. This is at least partially if not significantly where the growing gap between wage growth % and GDP growth % comes from. The macro economists were right that globalization would be more efficient overall for the world, economically. But that came at the expense of the US labor that saw its wage growth eroded as a consequence.