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The Productivity Paradox: Why Technology Makes the Economy More Efficient But Most People No Richer
(www.fullstackpm.tech)
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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Wages have increased a huge amount from the 1980s
Your graph is deceiving because it starts at 20 and not 0 on the y axis. It shows a very modest increase in wage, there are much better charts out there that plot wage growth Vs productivity growth. This makes the theft all the more obvious.
This chart uses mean productivity and MEDIAN wages. You posted a chart meant to deceive.
I'm not OP, but to play devil's advocate:
Wages have not raised as quickly as rent has raised, unfortunately. As per the U.S. Department of the Treasury (posted during the Biden administration):
This is inflation-adjusted, so it is comparable to your data. My point here is that while average wages have increased, average available spending money after paying for basic necessities has likely significantly decreased.
Yes, because the US doesn't build housing
The problem isn't available housing, it's artificial price inflation. There is no regulation on how much landlords can charge, so they just keep raising the price. Plus, they turn their vacant properties into AirBNBs, or worse, their only intention with the property was to turn it into an expensive AirBNB to begin with.
Then how come in places like Austin, where they built housing the rents dropped?
Now compare wages vs inflation, and wages vs GDP. GDP of developed countries has climbed dramatically since the 80's, while wage growth has slowed to a crawl relatively.
One must ask themself: where did all the money go?
It sure looked like it chartered a private jet to Venice Italy to rent out entire city blocks and get married in utter opulence, to me.
Forgot to say: when you take GDP and divide it by the population you get mean. When we talk about wages, we're talking about median wages. That's where the difference lies
I already compared wages vs. inflation
There's literally four inflation measures in this graph. Did the image load for you?