Why has the Productivity-Wage gap grown so much?

...

women enter the work force

white people have gotten lazy
look at the jobs mexicans have take

Automation.

Exactly this. Also, demographics. The baby boomer generation (the largest generation ever) entered the workforce en mass and women followed en mass shortly thereafter. The sudden influx of new workers devalued labor. It's an unpopular truth, but fortunately the truth doesn't care what we think of it.

Women and immigrants

the only right answer

women, immigration and outsourcing

It makes perfect sense. The demand for labor goes down and therefore the price does as well. It's amazing to me that real wages have remained relatively flat rather than dramatically dropped.

why are wages so low?
Because labor has no representation on the board of directors in most corporations

Because (((they))) are teaching young, impressionable, white minds that being self-employed makes you an oppressor.

Central Banks printing more and more money

stolen surplus value obvs

Computers. Literally. The other day I had to use a typewriter for a form I couldn't find an editable PDF version of. I pulled a typewriter out of storage, wiped about an inch of dust off of it and it still worked, so I used it. I went from typing about 90-100 words per minute on a computer to 20-30 on a typewriter. I had to type up 50 individual forms and then run 10 copies off of each. On a computer it might have taken me 20 minutes. On the typewriter it took a couple of hours. If I'd had to type out all 500 copies it would have taken a couple of days, or a room full of typists.

Because productivity gains are largely coming from technology, not from labor. Computers and robots are increasing the worker's capacity to produce, and the workers are not capturing the gains because they aren't producing the value.

Put it simply:

You're a painter who can paint 1 wall an hour. You're paid 10/hour for this.

Then one day the business owner comes in and gives you a brand new paintbrush, much bigger, that enables you (with minimal retraining) to pain 3 walls an hour.

Your productivity has tripled, but is this due to YOU, or the paintbrush?

If the paintbrush, then why do you expect to get paid substantially more for the same amount of labor?

We've essentially maxed out the productivity gains we can get from labor. Everything else from here on out will be due to tech improving and capital investment.

But equity in companies if you want to capture this.

If too many people see their paycheck decreasing, they'll flip a shit.

Doesn't matter how much wealth is available, if that number goes down you've got angry people on your hand.

But there's no reason you wouldn't buy the machine yourself and capture all the margin if it was this simple. This is the result of cronyism becoming more rampant and creating barriers that can't be competed with so larger margins can be captured by larger entities at the expense of the people.

Except in this case the employee would need extensive training with said larger brush in order to even get hired I'm the first place

It's not the Federal Reserve.

Labor surplus due to immigration and women entering the work force.

It's basic economics.

>But there's no reason you wouldn't buy the machine yourself and capture all the margin if it was this simple

It's not that simple. Capital ownership entails massive risk.

If you buy the machine, you have to pay for upkeep, updating it, and replacing it. If the machine catches fire or brakes, you eat that loss. You could lose everything if your business doesn't work out.

Many people would rather not accept that direct risk.

Cronyism is a large factor, but not perfectly explanatory.

But that's just it. Nowadays extensive training is NOT required for most jobs. Automation means you only have to know how to push a button and troubleshoot problems to produce stuff.

The benefits of industrialization were shared more equally because knowing HOW to work the machine was a vital part of the equation.

Now you only need a handful of people who know how the machine (or the program) works, and a bunch of schmucks who can supply them and keep them running while it does the work.

>breaking the gold standard

>It's not that simple. Capital ownership entails massive risk.
Did capital risk change since the 70s? I would say yes dramatically and that's a really good point that would explain the graph pretty well.