[SideQuark]

There’s plenty of papers showing exactly this. What do you think has driven productivity? People simply bring smarter?

The fact is capital expenditure from company or investors has bought machinery, compute, pipelines, transport, and massive investment to make those workers more productive for decades. As such, the returns to capital as a share has increased. Those places able to deploy capital to add productivity win over those that don’t.

And real total remuneration across all quintiles has increased significantly. BLS among others has all historical data to check.

If/when there’s a period where there isn’t more gains to be had by more investment per worker, and workers become more productive via their own skill (education, diet, genetic implants,…), then more returns will flow that direction.

This is all well known, and easily checked.

[stymaar]

> What do you think has driven productivity?

“Productivity” is a terrible metric for such a discussion, it's not what it sounds, it's merely “real” GDP/worked hours.

> The fact is capital expenditure from company or investors has bought machinery, compute, pipelines, transport, and massive investment to make those workers more productive for decades. As such, the returns to capital as a share has increased. Those places able to deploy capital to add productivity win over those that don’t.

This is the fairy tale you learn in econ 101, but in reality that's not what happened in the period, the businesses that won during the 2000-24 period (the so-called “tech” companies) were companies for which capex were well below average.

> This is all well known, and easily checked.

That's not “well known”, you're just saying the gospel. It doesn't matter if it's contradicted by evidences, you believe that how the world work so it must be true.

[SideQuark]

It's interesting you cut out the "There’s plenty of papers showing exactly this." then pretended the rest is simply ignorant belief.

> the businesses that won during the 2000-24 period (the so-called “tech” companies) were companies for which capex were well below average.

First, it's odd that when discussing the point about total US worker productivity and capital expenditures, you somehow think a sector consisting of less than 1% of workers is evidence. And even on that claim you are incorrect.

Here's the datasets for that period capex by industry [1]. You are demonstrably wrong by a large margin. I expect you to have some better sourced or more convincing data, otherwise it seems you're operating on belief, not evidence.

If you want to try again, try looking at all workers, not cherry picked examples.

> That's not “well known”, you're just saying the gospel

Here's google scholar on the literature around this [2]. Go ahead and tell me again how this is not well known? Pretty much every paper and piece of empirical evidence on this points to the same reasons.

[1] https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/dataarch...

[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,15&q=us+pr...