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.