> It's not the managers or capital owners that have been driving these productivity gains either
Citation needed.
I'm under the impression most of the productivity gains since the early 1990s were due to large capital improvements, which aren't paid for by employees. And productivity increases due to decreased costs thanks globalization and open source software.
> yet they have been the ones benefiting from the gains
I think lots of arguments ignore the fact that health care has outpaced wages and CPI by more than 100% in the last 15 years. Companies still pay the lion's share of health insurance costs for employees. You don't see your paycheck getting bigger, but your total compensation (if you get employer sponsored health insurance) has risen.
> I'm under the impression most of the productivity gains since the early 1990s were due to large capital improvement
Money doesn't magically increase productivity, those gains came from that money going to very smart people who created and/or applied technology to increase productivity. They're called workers, and they are the ones who increased productivity, not the capital holders.
Throwing a billion dollars at a problem to solve it only buys you people capable of solving it, it doesn't mean you solved it.
> You don't see your paycheck getting bigger, but your total compensation (if you get employer sponsored health insurance) has risen.
This is wrong. While the majority of people haven't been seeing an increase in wages, the upper-middle class has[1]. Workers don't see things like "total compensation" when it all goes to insurance premiums. If the lower classes continue to experience a declining quality of life while the upper classes live opulently, there will come a time of destabilization. Don't you understand this? Shouldn't we try to avoid that?
Total compensation is up that is a fact, healthcare costs have risen dramatically post Obamacare and paying that cost is the raise most Americans got over the last 8 years.
>> It's not the managers or capital owners that have been driving these productivity gains either
> I'm under the impression most of the productivity gains since the early 1990s were due to large capital improvements, which aren't paid for by employees.
Expanding here, the improvement in information and communication technology (one aspect of capital investment) has dramatically increased the effectiveness of intelligent management at the top. They have vastly more signals, and vastly higher granularity, with which to make decisions.
I don't have data one way or another, but I could believe that managers' productivity-per-unit-talent has improved more than line-workers' productivity-per-unit-talent.
