Housing is only a part of the basket used to measure inflation. Housing's price rose faster than the weighted basket average, some other goods and services rose slower or even fell.
Samsung TV purchasing power has skyrocketed, though, so there's that.
As long as accommodation isn't 100% of your basket of goods and services you use to measure inflation, accommodation can rise in price faster (or slower) than the basket. This ain't exactly rocket science.
You cannot have rising inflation adjusted wages and worse spending power, unless the inflation is not being measured meaningfully.
Also any comparison of wage growth vs corporate profit growth over the last 30 years shows that wages have not kept pace with the increase in productivity.
So incomes are only just barely keeping up, when they should be booming.
The USA is rather unique in its low pensions compared to countries in the EU or Australia (notable for its high contribution rates).
About 18% is owned by foreign entities.
It's not greater profits but lower costs (and prices) that matter here.
I'm all in favour of lowering barriers to entry, too. We need more competition.
Be that from startups, from foreign companies (like from China), or from companies in other sectors branching out (eg Walmart letting you open bank accounts).
Would you rather sell one widget for $1000 or 1000 widgets for $10? Does the answer depend on costs?
If you want to spin up some conspiracy theory about elites snatching up productivity gains, you should focus on top managers.
(Though honestly, it's mostly just land. The share of GDP going to capital has been roughly steady over the decade. The share going to land has increased slightly at the cost of the labour share.
The labour share itself has seen some shake up in its distribution. But that doesn't involve shareholders.)
The oligarchy of the CxOs and boards and cross-pollination has led to concentration of the rewards of companies into the their hands, compared to 40 years ago.
All the productivity gains have not gone to labor, its predominately gone to equity and then extracted via options and buy backs to avoid tax which means public service and investment has gone down.
The craziness of the USG borrowing to fund tax cuts is the ultimate example.
What your evidence for that? See https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r... for a good account.
> [...] and then extracted via options and buy backs to avoid tax which means public service and investment has gone down.
You seem very confused about how capital markets work. Are you also suggesting buy backs are morally different from dividends?
In any case, the whole point of investing (at least to the investor) is to eventually get more money back than you put in. Returning money to investor is not a bug, it's the point.
> The craziness of the USG borrowing to fund tax cuts is the ultimate example.
Blame voters.
We document the cumulative effect of four decades of income growth below the growth of per capita gross national income and estimate that aggregate income for the population below the 90th percentile over this time period would have been $2.5 trillion (67 percent) higher in 2018 had income growth since 1975 remained as equitable as it was in the first two post-War decades. From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.
Total employee compensation includes things like the value of employer provided health insurance.
Karl Marx would argue this evil because this take away the value and job satisfaction from the labour.
Quoting Marx is a bit like quoting Aristotle or Ptolemy.
This isn't just automation btw, but also just business decisions, like merging companies, outsourcing, or moving production elsewhere - e.g. a lot of western European manufacturing has moved eastwards (eastern Europe, Asia, etc). People who have a 30+ years career in that industry found themselves on the proverbial street with another 10+ years until their retirement, and due to trickery (= letting their employer go bankrupt) they didn't even get paid a decent severance fee.
I don't think its automation that increases living standards. We increase living standards by consuming more energy, and that often comes along with increasing the amount of costs we externalize to someone else (like pollution or deforestation, for example).
yeah but it's clear that we're not doing that, and are arguably going the other direction as hard as possible
Automation is a game of diffuse societal benefit at the expense of a few workers. Well, I guess owners also benefit but in the long term that extra profit is competed away.