On top of that, increasing adoption of technology means that more of the economy becomes driven by engineers. Computer science is one of the few fields where a top 1% individual can actually be 10x more productive than the median.
Combine these two things together - being able to instantaneously scale improvements across billions of customers for almost free because of the Internet, and technology's growth resulting in more jobs having a wider productivity gap between median and top 1% - and you get massive salaries for the top 1% and comparative peanuts for everyone else.
The exact same dynamic plays out in finance, Hollywood, YouTube content creation, and other winner takes all markets.
finance for instance has an underbelly of insider information being traded constantly, just as hollywood (and nyc real estate) is choked by cartel behavior (production and labor at least).
Is Facebook's dominance due to regulatory capture? No. (You could argue lack of adequate regulation, but that's not what we usually mean by "regulatory capture".) Is it due to bribery? No. Collusion? No.
Same with Google. No, no, and no. Amazon? No, no, and no.
(You could make a case for collusion with Microsoft...)
The reason that Google Search punishes slow loading sites, as proven by the AMP 'nice comparative boost' controversy, is because most of the time a page loads slowly is because it has multiple ad network trackers on it. Google will do anything to stop a page from doing that. The good news is this stuff is already being called out for anti-trust issues.
So, to simplify things, you have some placement exam. You're only allowed to take it once, twice, or a few times at a critical point in your life. We know that exam is only correlated like 0.30 at best with actual aptitude, which fluctuates over time. And yet that exam is treated as if it is correlated 0.90 or greater with aptitude, and that aptitude cannot change.
This is part of the problem too.
Some (much?) of this winner-takes-all phenomenon is due to societal structures around these occupations, nothing inherent to the occupations or activities themselves. It's rent-seeking and protectionism. My guess is at some level it's not a whole lot different from economic dynamics pre-world-wars era, but justified through different means, where society is blind for whatever reason to the errors in economic assumptions that the world works around, and the serious consequences those errors bring.
Increases in scale from technology undoubtedly play a role, but I doubt that's all of it. The NY Times once published an article about income distributions across fields, and you could see this winner-takes all phenomenon in all sorts of places. To me, it seems to have something to do with salary and benefits distributions more than anything else.
If you take medicine just as one example (which could be an entire book into itself), it's true that there have been technological advances that scale all sorts of things. But there's also little natural competition, due to overregulation. So you have a hierarchy, with medical administrators on top, physicians below, nurses below that, and then everyone else at increasing degrees of separation. This occurs in part because of the tendency for the administrators to control cash flows toward themselves, but also because the regulations make it impossible for cost structures to exist in any way but one where physicians get paid the most.
There's lots of examples of this. In my mind, the problem really is income distribution. It's not a matter of equality in the stereotypical communist sense, but more about fair or rational evaluation in an economic sense.
Everyone can point to bubbles in markets and say "this is way too overvaluated." That's something that has a clear meaning, even if it's hard to define at times. To me this overvaluation is everywhere. We live in an era of monopolies, and we rationalize it everywhere.
If you're a top 1% pediatrician you don't get paid much more than a median pediatrician. That's because it's pretty hard (impossible?) to be a 10x pediatrician. On the other hand, you can make the argument that 10x neurosurgeons or heart surgeons exist.
Is it possible to do better than we are? Probably. How much better? I don't know.
We could repudiate NAFTA and close off trade with China. This could bring back local manufacturing, and the possibility of a working-class job being a reasonable life. This could also lead to us falling behind the rest of the world, as they create economies of scale that we can't match. Is that better or worse than the current state of affairs? I don't know.
> The situations of Asian countries and the United States differ substantially in the details, but both face the same core problem: how to offer as many people as possible a decent job with a family wage.
This is the heart of the (rather length) article. Elite competition is so intense because the consequences of not making it into the elite are so stark. (Related: Even getting the elite degree doesn't mean that you get a decent job. The elite competition doesn't end when you get into college, or even when you get out.)