[smallmancontrov]

Oh good! I was worried that trickle down economics was self-serving nonsense pushed by think tank economists on behalf of their benefactors. Since it is economic fact rather than self-serving fiction, when I review its track record I will find that it caused an upward inflection in real wages, right? Right?

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Oops!

[zardo]

As long as capital doesn't get involved in some kind of highly financialized spiral getting further and further divorced from the real economy, we should be good.

[malfist]

That could never happen here. We have a history of strongly regulating capital and banks. Why look at all the executives we jailed for the 2008 financial crisis!

[zozbot234]

Total labor compensation has in fact grown. Unfortunately, much of the non-wage compensation involves services like healthcare that has become a lot more expensive over time due to burdensome overregulation and an overall lack of price transparency.

[JuniperMesos]

Also the wages of the fairly-large number of people who work in the health care industry itself.

[gruez]

>Since it is economic fact rather than self-serving fiction [...]

You deride the weak justification for trickle down economics, then proceed to link wtfhappenedin1971.com, a site that tries to argue for the reintroduction of the gold standard through a gish-gallop of random charts?

[smallmancontrov]

The gap between productivity and wages is striking, isn't it?

I'm not perfectly aligned with gold bug politics. Their faith in the Kindleberger world is misplaced and their tax aversion can make them useful to my opponents, but at the same time they tend to take the Cantillon Pump and Balance of Payments mechanisms seriously while my traditional allies do not.

No, I don't mind borrowing their charts. Why? Do you have a better go-to link for The Wedge?

[gruez]

>The gap between productivity and wages is striking, isn't it?

It's not. The (in)famous epi.org is flawed for all sorts of reasons, from excluding noproduction/supervisory workers (the highest compensated ones!), to excluding non-wage compensation (eg. benefits), to different deflators for compensation vs productivity. If you adjust for all of that, the chart is unremarkable.

https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/gr...

That incidentally, is the exact problem with the site. It presents a barrage of charts, without regard to relevance or rigor, and tries to persuade through sheer volume alone. Yet, if you scrutinize any of them, it quickly falls apart. That's probably why the site doesn't even bother justifying the charts, or even state the thesis, for that matter.

[cyberax]

There are deep problems with _both_ arguments. Your "happy fun chart" does not include negative effects from the _types_ of jobs that are available now.

Nearly all good jobs are now concentrated in dense city cores, in the ever-dwindling set of large cities. This drives up the _cost_ of having these jobs. For example, the median ratio of rent to income is rising: https://www.moodyscre.com/insights/cre-trends/housing-afford...

And this "cost of work" is not only monetary but also psychological and physical (it takes longer to commute). You also don't get nearly the same amount of job security as your parents.

From the epi.org chart - it indeed misses that a lot of stuff is now cheaper. Clothes, electronics, toys and even appliances - they are so cheap that we now treat them as disposable!

[smallmancontrov]

This smells like the think-tank "CEO comp justifies worker underpayment" and "health care inflation is wages" arguments, I'll look into your source but I can't pretend to have high hopes.

As for "gish gallop," right back atcha: those billionaire-funded think tanks firehose a lot of nonsense into the economic discourse (and curricula!)