[davidp]

What do those charts look like for the rest of the world? I don't have the stats handy but I'm fairly confident that the middle class in China, Indonesia, and Malaysia has dramatically expanded over that time period, so it's arguable that the world is a (net) better place. If the author wants to make a nationalistic argument that US workers should have done better than their counterparts elsewhere, I guess that's OK, but I suspect that's not his intent. Either way, ignoring the fact of increased globalization over that time period undercuts the argument.

Rather, his supposition is that middle-income workers in the US have missed out on gains that have instead gone to upper-income workers in the US. That's false, for the same reason that workers in a single company don't "miss out" on the money given to its executives. As defined by skill sets, the labor pools for upper-income workers and lower-income workers don't intersect, globally or otherwise.

This matters because it affects the solutions we choose. Income inequality is a symptom of the deeper problem of reduced American competitiveness 1) relative to our peers, 2) in the middle- and lower-income labor markets. Because so many more middle- and lower-income skill workers have come online, who are delighted to accept lower wages than US workers because it's an order-of-magnitude improvement over what they had before, these US workers would lose ground merely by remaining as productive as they were 34 years ago.

So in order to maintain the globally-superior wages we have become accustomed to, we must maintain and even increase our productivity edge. How do we do that?

That is the challenge, not income inequality itself. "Fixing" the problem by calling the situation "unfair" (and taxing upper-income US workers out of vengeance for their presumed unfairness and exploitation) isn't a fix at all. It's like prescribing painkillers when someone has a broken leg; the problem isn't the pain, it's the broken leg.

[whicks]

It seems to me that you're ignoring the huge increases on the far right side of the graphs in the article. How does the wage increase of the top 1% (or higher, even) factor into your view of the "less competitive" middle income working class of the US? Has the top 1% really become _that_ much more productive over the last few decades relative to the middle class? I really don't think so, but I'm not an expert on this.

It seems to me that you're defending the uppermost social class in the US, and are attempting to place blame on the middle class of the US for not being able to compete on the global stage against the lower classes of third world nations. They aren't necessarily more productive, they're just willing to work for less. A lot less. I may be misunderstanding your entire point, though.

> So in order to maintain the globally-superior wages we have become accustomed to, we must maintain and even increase our productivity edge. How do we do that?

Couldn't we do this by having competitive taxes on the highest income workers, and then reinvesting that money into things like: reducing the cost of education, reducing the cost of healthcare, improving mass transit and infrastructure, and other things that in general detract from the middle class's ability to "increase our productivity edge". This seems like at least a step in the right direction, instead of allowing the upper echelons of society to vacuum up and hoard billions of dollars that aren't serving any higher goals other than making a select few wealthy beyond reason.

[davidp]

> Has the top 1% really become _that_ much more productive over the last few decades relative to the middle class?

No, and that's actually the crucial point: High wage earners in the US have remained that much more productive than their competitors around the globe. They don't compete/compare at all with middle- and low-wage earners in the US. The "pie" we're slicing up isn't the US GDP (which would be the zero-sum game you-win-I-lose math assumed in the article), it's global GDP.

> It seems to me that you're defending the uppermost social class in the US, and are attempting to place blame on the middle class of the US for not being able to compete on the global stage against the lower classes of third world nations. They aren't necessarily more productive, they're just willing to work for less. A lot less.

I'm identifying the correct problem to solve. The goal is to return to income growth distribution closer to that seen in 1980, since there's a host of benefits to a pluralistic democracy when everyone is doing well. In particular it makes social transitions much easier, such as social justice and access to healthcare, because there's less sense of loss for the incumbents, and the costs of the changes can be borne more easily.

But if you misidentify the problem as mere existence of difference in income, or worse, that growth in the high-income bracket comes exclusively or even mostly from exploitation ("unfairness"), then you'll never solve the real problem, which is:

> They aren't necessarily more productive, they're just willing to work for less. A lot less.

Exactly. The same work, at the same quality, is now actually worth less in real dollar terms than it used to be.

In the 50s and 60s US middle-income workers were much more productive than their peers in other countries, and could charge more for their labor. Now others in the world have caught up (dramatically improving their own quality of life, it should be noted), and if we want to keep getting paid more than them, we have to increase our productivity again. Alternatively we could put trade barriers in place to tilt the playing field in our favor, but the cost for that is borne by consumers of all income classes (via higher prices).