| You'd need a chart that shows the different percentiles of wages. A single line of average real wages wouldn't do much, and also doesn't actually show any decline. There's an infamous chart that seems to show that real wages lag behind productivity. Alas, that chart uses different measures of inflation for the two lines in that chart. Thus it's completely useless. You can have a look at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG for the 'Share of Labour Compensation in GDP': if you are only interested in inequality, you don't need to worry about inflation, you can just divide total nominal labour income by total nominal gdp to cancel out the price level. The labour share of GDP in the US has been remarkably stable. FRED has data since 1950, and the labour share has stayed between 58% to 65% in that time. (If you want to dig deeper: the capital share of GDP has been mostly constant. It's the share that goes to land that has increased.) In any case, as I said above, the average income from labour has done just fine. It's the difference between workers that might be interesting to look at: eg CEO vs burger flipper. |
CEO vs burger flipper seems to be the lion’s share of the difference.