> Your bullet points these may well be immediate causes, but if you say something like 'real wages decreasing' well then you need to ask, what's the cause of that? And what's the cause of whatever caused that?

The root cause isn't a known thing to my knowledge.

Robert Putnam (Harvard prof who has advised several presidents) has been looking at this for a while now. I had the privilege of hearing him talk about it a couple of years back.

His objective is to identify the mechanisms through which economic inequality interacts with things like social cohesion, examining hundreds of indicators over the past century and further, such as the frequency of bipartisan bills, the incidence of social club membership, unions, incidence of interracial relationships, etc.

I recall a few notable points; Firstly social cohesion had a low around the turn of the century (1900) and peaked around the mid 1960s and is currently dropping. Secondly, economic inequality indicators follow the same pattern, but trail social cohesion indicators by 5-10 years if I remember correctly. Thirdly, the effect is noticable in the US (and to a lesser extent the UK) but varies a lot internationally.

(I don't have links, this was all verbal. He said he was considering putting it in a book, which to my knowledge is not yet published)

OK, but how does lack of social cohesion cause a drop in real wages? There are a few mechanisms I can think of, and probably multiple are operating, but one way is that an atomized electorate does not have the ability to resist changes in the law that are detrimental to their broad interests. Thus, you get massive pro-corporate/shareholder legal changes that create increased competition for labor.

What's changed is that when a businessman needs some work done, the first thing he is going to look at is if the job can be automated. The second is that he'll look for lower cost offshore labor, made possible by cheap shipping and telecommunications, but also free trade agreements. The third is that he'll look to hire a legal or illegal immigrant who will take a lower wage. The fourth is that he'll look to move from a northern state to a southern right to work state, made possible by Taft-Hartley and its successors, and pliable Southern legislatures, where he can hire non-union labor who will take a lower wage. With so much new competition for labor, much of it government created, it's not surprising that economic growth is not flowing to labor.

Interesting. That sounds like what helped income inequality was recognizing that other person as one of "us", whom you could not treat as just someone to exploit as severely as possible.

Many studies have already checked and confirmed these things. There is a wealth of research on poverty and inequality, which is why I say we don't need more studies to figure it out -- we already know.

Now is the time for action in response to the findings.

Please provide some sources for these 'many studies'.

Begin with looking at U-6 as the actual unemployment rate, combine that with the gradual increase in labor force participation rate since the 70s (as people are compelled to work in two-income households to survive, etc) which has been collapsing in spite of the pressure only increasing further (disability? people becoming too broken to work anymore?) and the decline of real wages in lower percentiles against inflation and productivity gains.

To people in the real world all this is simply lived experience rather than abstractions. It's tangibly, obviously real.

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/01/charts-whats-the-real-unempl... http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Dude, go find your own studies. The OP content is now at the level of "Sun is bright and hot" level of having been studied.

At some point, it stops becoming on us to link to studies for well-documented stuff, and on you to show the intellectual curiosity to find it on your own (and intellectual honesty to accept it).

Regarding the claim that “real wages have decreased” — yet I have studied that show such claims ignore the dramatically lower prices for consumer goods and the dramatic increase in non-wage benefits.

I am not arguing that wages are up or down, but there is enough reasonable doubt that such statements aren’t in the realm of “the sun is hot.”

Science should be continually challenging assumptions — especially social science where there is huge opportunity for bias and inconsistently.

Doing more studies reminds me of the behavior of the tobacco companies for a long time. They always wanted more studies and bought more time that way.