Big Lies and Little Progress: Reviewing Four Years of Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class”
@GuerillaOntologist I saw that the labor share graph came from an X post in this article. Kishore's commentary with it was a bit disengenuous (probably due to the reactionary need for rebuttal of ??? Sanders). Biden was certainly not going to buck the trend, but it looks like the latest big acceleration came under Obama whose appointment of Rahm Emanuel was certainly in obeisance to Wall Street.
Interesting that the peak was in 1960. The graph follows labor union membership decline.
@lwriemen And what I see in the Labor Share of Income chart is a slow decline from 1950-2001, when the internet bubble popped and incomes never recovered after the ensuing recession. It leveled off for a few years (though never recovered) until the 2008 financial crisis again wiped out tons of labor income. The only thing that brought it back up again was, sadly enough, COVID - I assume due to gov't income transfers combined with business disruptions due to supply chain hangups and the like.
@lwriemen And for anyone reading who's not an econ 🤓 , the Labor Share of Income is the percentage of income taken home by wage and salary workers, as opposed to income derived from stock, bond, or property ownership. This percentage has been in long-term decline as long as you've been alive, unless you were born in the 1940s. It's basically another way of looking the productivity vs. wages chart that shows a big divergence after about 1974, though this makes the longer term pattern clearer, imo
@lwriemen The point for me (and of the article) is that it's been moving in one direction for all of our lives. This never gets mentioned (or almost never) in discussions of wealth inequality, but if we're serious about addressing said inequality, we need to take a long hard look at why that graph looks the way it does...and then we need to reverse it. We get celebrate minor victories, but all the while we're losing the (class) war - under every administration.