Hot topic these days is how wages have remained stagnant for a long, long time … while productivity – think output per labor-hour has soared.
The political explanation: over-sized paychecks to greedy CEO’s have been draining the coffers.
That may be a part of the answer, but I bet it’s statistically insignificant.
I haven’t run the nums, but I bet that zeroing all CEO compensation wouldn’t budge the below chart.
In addition to greedy CEO’s, the batch of suspects usually includes: automation (shifting jobs to machines & computers), globalization (moving jobs to low wage areas), immigration (an influx of cheap labor).
In other words, the supply of labor and the demand for labor are out of whack.
OK, I get that.
But nobody seems to ever mention a pretty obvious bump in the supply of labor ….
The Homa Files 