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Oh, so NOW correlation is causation. Great, I'll go correct my notes so I don't forget, it's always so confusing. There's one thing lacking here, and that is,
by InclinedPlane 13y ago
Oh, so NOW correlation is causation. Great, I'll go correct my notes so I don't forget, it's always so confusing.
There's one thing lacking here, and that is, of course, a causal link. It would be nice if they went down the line and compared employee wages relative to corporate profits on a per company basis. It might be that there are different things at play here.
There's a lot of data missing from this incredibly shallow analysis. Not that I dispute the results, but the argument isn't well backed by the data.
Edit: as a side note I think a lot of problems with employment in the developed world today are due to extremely outdated labor laws that prove to be more damaging than helpful. The expectation of the entire system is that workers will be locked into employment at a particular company for life, will work 40hr/wk on average week in week out, and will rise in pay incrementally over their career. Those assumptions result in worker benefits being tied to employers. They're why the government can get away with hiding half the tax rate of the payroll tax from workers behind the "employer contribution". They're partly why savings rates have fallen so badly over the past few decades. And so on. A lot of which is ultimately to the detriment of the individual worker. If workers were more independent and more mobile, able to self-employ more easily, and so on then they'd tend to have much higher wages on average, I'd wager. The current system doesn't reward independence, it punishes it, but independence is precisely how workers gain an upper hand once they've built up a considerable amount of experience.
- brc 13y agoThe thinking tends to imply that somewhere, workers wages are being set by a central committee, who is more interested in profits than wages. Such thinking is wrong. I agree that there may be some cause that makes profits go higher and wages go lower, or they could be totally unrelated. But the driver of wages is competition for hiring people. It's no surprise that in a time of relatively higher employment, there has been little or no wages growth. What is surprising is that corporate profits have expanded. But then, if you have a monetary regime where printing money (QE) is designed to re-inflate the capital of financial institutions via devaluing the currency, then it's not surprising that profits go up for those with first bite at the new-money. Is that the cause? I doubt it. But can someone hold down employee wages for the sole purpose of increasing their profits? No. Solve unemployment, and you will solve stagnant wages growth.
- nabla9 13y agoWhen you cut the pie into different size pieces and one gets more than before and one gets less, causality is trivial.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoClassic zero sum game fallacy.