ManintheField
Banned
It's not just the Internet
It really, genuinely is. Or, rather, the story you're told isn't complete and the narrative it's meant to support in your head doesn't reflect reality. Total compensation (wages/salary + benefits) only started diverging from productivity in the middle 2000's with the rise of the housing boom (which probably helped cover up what would have otherwise been stagnation) and median personal income (the income of the person at the 50th percentile of income earners, so a statistic entirely deadened to income increases in the top 1%, or even 20%) stopped increasing at about the same time.
More broadly, the idea that 'wages have stagnated therefore there are a lot of people whose lives have never gotten better' is a kind of statistical ignorance that only the general public is capable of on any kind of sustained scale. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of people experience income growth over the course of their life(it has been a very long time since I've run the stats but, the last time I saw anyone do it, the majority of people start out in the lowest quintile, move up to the 3rd highest, then gently decline into retirement on a fixed income), that different income brackets experience tremendous turnover as people move out of them and new people move into them, and that the kind of arguments people are having about wealth and poverty are utterly uninformed by reality.
If you want the 'median wage' to keep growing after the 70's, you need to do a laundry list of things:
1. Divorce health insurance from employment. Health insurance payments make up a huge portion of total compensation and, after a certain point in the 80's, represented a large portion of the growth in total compensation. If people are getting this in monetary payments instead of in-kind payments like health insurance, you're going to see wage/salary growth along with total compensation growth.
2. Prevent the immigration liberalization of the 60's and have continuous crackdowns on illegal immigration. One of the important contributors to the statistical artifact that is wage growth is a composition effect you see when you add a whole bunch of people on the low end of the income spectrum while the people who previously occupied that end move upwards. Wages look like they are stagnating even as most people experience income growth.
3. Have a Federal Reserve that pursues a consistent, responsible monetary policy that expands liberally in times of economic hardship but pulls back as the economy starts overheating. What seems to have been a big problem in the early part of the 2000's, when a lot of labor compensation statistics started diverging from productivity is that the Federal Reserve overshot its attempt to push a recovery from the dotcom bubble. A confluence of factors combined with an overly loose monetary policy to drive a housing boom that sucked income and productivity out of most of the economy and shoved it into housing/construction and related sectors.
4. Fuck China. Seriously, destroy the whole economic miracle in East Asia, make it entirely untenable for manufacturing to move elsewhere. One major driver of actual personal quality of life stagnation amongst lower income Americans has been the need to compete with literally billions of lower income foreigners, primarily in China but also in places like Eastern Europe, South Asia, or Africa. Economic success elsewhere is very important to long-run growth in the US, but in the relatively short run a lot of people can lose badly trying to compete with third-world workers who are willing to do the same job for a tenth of the price. Kill Deng, have the Gang of Four never lose power, anything to really fuck China really fucking hard. Have the License Raj never go away, save the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe, and subject Africa to another round of revolution, civil war, and genocide, and things start looking increasingly good for first world workers in the short run.
And that's all really just to start. Just So stories about the power of capital are interesting, but unrelated to this particular media 'statistic'.