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https://scottsantens.substack.com/p/universal-basic-income-is-your-productivity>
"There was a time in America when productivity growth and wage growth moved
together. From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, as productivity
rose, pay rose with it. Workers produced more and earned more. That was not
charity. It was the natural result of an economy that shared its gains with
those who generated them.
That relationship is dead. It has been dead for half a century.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, since 1979, productivity has
annually grown over twice the rate on average as typical worker pay. Before the
late 1970s, these lines were practically the same line. Then policy choices —
the erosion of the minimum wage, the dismantling of unions, tax cuts for the
rich, deregulation — broke the link between what the economy produced and what
most people received. The income generated by rising productivity did not
vanish. It went into the salaries of top executives, into corporate profits,
and into returns to shareholders.
A February 2025 study by the RAND Corporation put a number on it. Carter Price
estimated the gap between what the bottom 90 percent of American workers earned
in 2023 and what they would have earned had income growth remained as evenly
distributed as it was in 1975. The annual gap in 2023 alone was $3.9 trillion.
The cumulative total since 1975 was $79 trillion. Seventy-nine trillion dollars
flowed upward, away from the vast majority of Americans, over five decades,
because we allowed it to happen through deliberate policy choices."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
