[ClumsyPilot]

Is GDP per capita appropriate metric? Japan has higher median salaries than US does.

How much of thay GDP is down to US being a global center of finance and location of corporate HQ of most gl9bal firms, pulling in wealth from across the world?

Also how much of that GDP remains if you remove the top 0.1% of richest people?

You may argue those things shouls not be remoced from GDP, but if we are discussing working life on an average person, this GDP number might not be reflective of it

[chii]

> Also how much of that GDP remains if you remove the top 0.1% of richest people?

those richest people don't personally contribute that much to GDP (their companies they own do). Removing them would make not much difference - their spending might be 10x or may be even 100x the average person, but there's so few of them that barely worth mentioning. It's not like they eat more food than normal people, nor wear out cars more than normal people. A few yachts and fancy cars notwithstanding, GDP is a measure of output, not wealth accumulation.

[ClumsyPilot]

Fair enough, but how is this discrepancy between wages and GDP explainable?

[chii]

Wages are the minimum people accept for their labour. GDP is a measure of productivity, which can increase with investment in plant and equipment (and tech via R&D).

If a worker is more efficient, but every worker is also made more efficient (because of the equipment or tech), then their bargaining power doesn't grow with their productivity increase!

The exceptions are where their individual output is higher - aka, skill. Tech workers getting higher wages is evidence of this. At some point, the number of tech workers would saturate as it is such a lucrative profession compared to many others - it's just the 2000 dot-com pop caused a huge drop in enrollments in universities and the lack of graduates is still felt today imho.

Meanwhile, a services industry worker still outputs the same amount of "work" as they've done before in yester-century (not much tech can improve their output). The pay for them have not really grown, because there's no room to grow. Only mandates like minimum wage increases cause it to grow, and those hardly come by.

[mrep]

> Japan has higher median salaries than US does.

Where do you see that? Wikipedia says the US has 2x the median income PPP than Japan [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income