zlacker

>>tysone+(OP)
These articles are quite disingenuous as they constantly focus on hourly pay without giving a any context whatsoever to compensation : bonuses, matched retirement/investment plans, insurance, profit-sharing/equity plans, paid time off, paid sick leave days, etc. This really seems just disingenuous to me since this is a major part of compensation as the figures show.

And the worst part is that this measurement of compensation is actively measured and quantified. Here [1] it is. I'll take their word that productivity since 1973 has increased 77%. In that time real hourly compensation has increased 50% and growing.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB

>>TangoT+5R
This is probably heavily affected by at least two things:

1. increase in healthcare costs and how health insurance is bound to employment

2. increase in wealth concentration and a shift from cash compensation to asset compensation (Bezos is only absurdly rich if he liquidates his Amazon holding instantly)

So, I would say your portrayal of hourly compensation is disingenuous as well. All of these statistics probably need to be calculated as medians instead of means ("compensation per hour" sounds suspiciously like "total compensation / total hours", which is a mean) in order for it to come close to accurately describing the situation of the median American, because wealth concentration has skewed the mean American into something a lot more optimistic than one would think.