One that can be summarized thusly: "Top executives are taking all that money for themselves".
Average CEO in 1970, $700,000/yr, 25 x worker average.
Average CEO in 2012, $13,000,000/yr, 380 x worker average
The management salaries weren't the part of the calculation. They were considered constant and therefore insignificant in the mass production.
But now, when your CEO makes 380x worker average, and the rest of the apparatchiks make the same combined, and you have 250 workers - then it is no longer wise to "optimise" worker salaries at all because they are by far not the biggest expense!
That's capitalism turned upside down. And I know it because I see how people are able to account for recurring costs but put a blind eye on development and management costs.
P. S. Maybe it tells us it's CEO/traditional management who need to be disrupted now. In some areas you can imagine a worker's cooperative paying 1.5x average salary to workers, outsourcing their management cheap, and still being insanely competitive thanks to no apparat spendings.
($13,000,000-$700,000) / 28,000 = $439
Income has remained stagnant for the past 40 years. I don't understand how the massive gains achieved in the 40-60s is relevant.
The whole story behind the 1% thing is that for the past two generations the benefits of the massive productivity gains we've since achieved have gone disproportionately to owners of capital.
When we talk about income, we're really talking about a fraction: nominal dollars over the cost of living. The point isn't that there have been no wage increases, the point is that they've barely kept pace with inflation. Someone born in 1935 living in 1965 had experienced a huge shift in real wealth and had every reason to expect that as society's wealth increased so would his.
This is no longer the case.