Why are you comparing to 100 years ago - thats a non-sensical one, even my great-grandparents were minors 100 years ago.

Fine, go back 20, 30, 60 years. Practically take your pick. If you look at say federal transfer payments as percent GDP they were way lower.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=jU5N

Right, but again, I'm not talking transfer payments, or forced sharing, if I'd meant to speak to transfer payments, I would have said transfer payments, not 'shared prosperity'.

How would you define "shared prosperity" then? How would we compare it to some other time or place?

Profit sharing is probably the term we’re looking for here.

So corporations doing share buybacks and dividends? Something else? Is there a real number you're looking at in order to do a comparison, or just labeling some vague idea?

Share buybacks and dividends are profit sharing for shareholders, not workers...

A shareholder of a public company has done nothing for the company to generate value, even more when buying the paper from a previous shareholder and so not contributing to capitalise the enterprise.

Apart from helping to set pricing in the market, what exactly does a shareholder in the open market brings of value-generation to a company? Nothing. And they get dividends while most workers depend on the benesse of a company sharing bonuses and so on.

How do share buybacks equal profit sharing with employees? The employees are the ones doing the work, pay them before lecherous shareholders.

They don't, I'm trying to get a comparable number. "profit sharing" is too vague a term to compare two groups (across time or geography) with any credibility.

If we are going to compare on an axis, we need to first have a defined axis, otherwise it's just an opinion.

For instance, GGP and you both clarified things with two different definitions for "shared prosperity".

You’re splitting hairs here under the guise of data centrism. By virtually every metric shareholders are continuously improving their lives while workers have not. Obviously the 0.01-10% of the population that comprises shareholders with voting rights or majority holdings is a smaller cohort but when they improve their lot at the expense of everyone else we’re in a tyranny of the minority and doing nothing but argue is a wholly unacceptable state of affairs.

The premise of this thread is:

> Something is wrong with the economy, not just in the UK, but in America and probably a bunch of other countries. Where is the prosperity, if its there, why is it not more widely shared? is it a single cause, or is the cause manifold?

I'm trying to find basis for the part that references America, other than a gut feeling. If not transfer payments, GDP growth, real wage growth, then what? If everything we can measure says things are generally improving, then why the feeling that prosperity isn't happening?

Your response here tells me prosperity is pretty widespread as there are lot f shareholders in the US.

More good jobs for everyone.

Largely, in my adult life, I've seen management and shareholders pots grow, and labor stay the same.

When the pie grows everyone ought to get a little bigger piece of it.

Meanwhile, rent, price of a used or new car, college education, homeownership and medical costs have grown unabated - and generally faster than inflation.

Forced sharing is a silly way of referring to taxes which are fees assessed for collective services. Nobody builds anything alone and is a benefactor of all sorts of common goods, services and infrastructure. To say otherwise is to prefer the bootstraps narrative to reality.

Top marginal tax rate in the mid 1900s was 70-90% and the estate tax was actually assessed without exempting the first $14M or whatever it is.

It’s all a social construct and we collectively set the rules.

Weird, I hadn't heard of taxes. Thanks for your explanation.

>Top marginal tax rate in the mid 1900s was 70-90% and the estate tax was actually assessed.

Federal transfer payments (in %gdp), AKA forced sharing rather than providing some kind of quid-pro-quo service (which you allude to above), are increasing almost monotonically. Significantly higher than the mid 1900s.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=jU5N

This only seems to account for direct social spending, not indirect - which much of the cold war was, that large peacetime military, its transfer payments from the government to rural america.

Also, when I say shared prosperity, I dont mean transfer payments, nor do I mean forced sharing, I mean why are so few benefits of our greater productivity seen by the majority (bottom 2/3rds), why has the standard of living fallen in real terms for the bottom 50% of the country? why do we feel poorer?

Median real personal income has risen significantly in the past 1-2 generations. It looks like the common man in the US is doing quite well compared to our ancestors.

If we're looking at voluntary trade of wealth, rather than forced sharing, that seems to be doing quite well!

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

>why has the standard of living fallen in real terms for the bottom 50% of the country?

>Right, but again, I'm not talking transfer payments, or forced sharing, if I'd meant to speak to transfer payments, I would have said transfer payments, not 'shared prosperity'.

Do you think those at the bottom are getting most of their income from transfer payments or are they getting it from voluntary trade and charity? The people at the bottom are living off of transfer payments (forced sharing).

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>which makes the actual situation very clear: real median personal income has lagged substantially behind real GDP per capita ever since 1975 or so.

Perhaps the median worker is being 'robbed', but another explanation is merely the median worker isn't where the majority of the value creation gains have been located for the past ~50 years.

> Median real personal income has risen significantly in the past 1-2 generations.

That's already a warped measure. Given that we've seen GDP (and some other measures of overall economic productivity) rise during that time, the least you'd expect is that "median real personal income would rise".

But the more relevant question is: how has median real personal income risen compared to the overall increase in productivity? That is, we're doing/making more (and also buying/selling more), but who are the beneficiaries of this growth? If it isn't basically everyone, why not and should it be?

And here's the SLF graph for that:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Vgqj

which makes the actual situation very clear: real median personal income has lagged substantially behind real GDP per capita ever since 1975 or so.

There is effectively no cash welfare in the United States. Those who are getting cash income at the bottom of the scale are getting it because of disability or age.

Because there is no cash welfare, people are indeed earning their money mostly by performing work.

Forced sharing isn’t an accepted term or even one that is worth using in discourse. Transfer payments benefit society which in turn benefits the best off too. They benefit from them.

The effective tax rates when the marginal rates were 70-90% were not much different than they are now. Cherrypicking marginal tax rates while ignoring deductions against those rates is misleading and deceptive.

Havea source on that? I hadn't heard that before and am interested in what that looked like.

Yeah, things are about to get worse. The newer generation wants equality of outcome and wealth (aka communism). They're enamored by income equality and climate which is just a complete subjectivism take over. You can do no little and you can always do more. We're here to shame you.

Asian countries have adopted what worked in the west: Capitalism and lifting people out of poverty at an unprecendented rate.

Those that complain about inequality are totally ok with not comparing themselves to someone in Bangladesh. To them, you look like a multi-millionaire. The hypocrisy is so blindingly bright, it is unbelievable.

None of the current zeitgeist has any reason, rationality and logic. It is subjectivism and post-modernism in its worst form. Biting off the hand that feeds them.

>Biting off the hand that feeds them.

You forgot to mention that the hand doing the feeding is attached to a body with another arm that’s picking the hungry masses pockets.

Can you give an example of that? How are big corporations ruining your life? What has TSMC or IBM has done to you?

Where is the coercion and use of force?

I know someone who works for IBM, his healthcare costs more in real dollars than it did when he hired on, he gets at best infrequent raises and there's no more pension plan.

How is that ruining his life though? Why didn't you account for the fact that IBM provided for his family for years? They are welcome to leave, we are not practicing slavery and the best part of at-will hiring is that you can fire your employer and find another job.

Don’t know much about Tsmc. IBM is a rather terrible company though, between their incessant illegal discrimination, mass layoffs, near criminal monopolist behavior, etc. look at any large publicly traded company and the piles of skeletons behind them are shocking. you’ve shifted the goal posts from companies picking pockets (taking unwarranted profit, or worse) to making ruining lives. This isn’ta gotcha though, the state of capitalism is abysmal when we actually consider the crimes against humanity these corporations get away with every second of every day for the past hundred odd years.

The "newer generation" is reacting this way because there is no political alternative being offered. Speaking in terms of the US, where is the party that advocates fiscal responsibility? Not fake "fiscal responsibility" where the Fed gives away trillions of dollars in "loans" to the financial industry while politicians run interference by making a show about legislative spending, but actual fiscal responsibility that respects the inherently-distributed economy. It's been outside the Overton window since the everything-bubble was kicked off by the ending of the gold standard.

There are folks running for office that advocate for significantly less spending by the government as well as balanced fiscal discipline. People don't tend to vote for them.

Why bother talking about them? They stand zero chances to be elected, not having one of the two parties behind them. I repeat, zero chances. Zero.

Sure, candidates do exist sometimes. The deeper problem is the whole topic is swamped by the mainstream party that has claimed "fiscal responsibility" as part of their platform, while doing the exact opposite.