Worker hourly compensation in the United States (that's your average wages
per hour) went up between 1979 and 2019 (that's the last 40 years of the United States history),
hourly compensation, adjusted for what happens to prices,
went up in those 40 years a total of 17 percent. That's less than half a percent a year
in what your hourly wage, on average, could enable you to buy.
When you allow for the normal problems of statistics that's no increase at all.
Wow. But that's the least of it. Productivity of workers, how much output
each worker on average was able to generate, per hour rose over the same 40 years by 72 percent.
Okay, let's be sure we understand this. The wages per hour is what the employer gives the
employee. The productivity per hour is what the employee gives to the employer.
You get paid because you contribute to the output of goods and services that the employer gets,
and takes, and sells. If what the workers gave the employer rose by 72 percent,
whereas what the employer gave the worker on average rose by 17 over 40 years,
there's your explanation for why there's great inequality in the United States.
Because the mass of people, employees, gave way more to the minority, who are employers,
than the reverse. No mystery. It's right there. Here's another one of these remarkable statistics.
Between 1980 and 2018, roughly the same 40 years, for the average American consumer the share of
their total spending spent on health doubled. It cost twice as much to take care of your health
at the end of those 40 years (as a share of your income) than it did before.
Here's another statistic gets at it again. Between 2008 and 2018, so the last 10 years,
the number of states in which health insurance premiums and deductibles consumed at least 10%
of the median income of a citizen went from seven states (where it cost you 10% or more
of your income to cover your health expenditures and your health insurance included... seven states
cost you more than 10 percent) by the end of that 2018, 42 states cost you more than 10%.
The cost of health went crazy. But if you think, and you know from your own experience how that's
the case, then think about this statistic. The price of education between 1980 and 2018. again
those same 40 years. increased 600 percent more than people's incomes. That's why students are in
debt. That's why families are in debt. That's why the whole economy is sinking under a mountain of
the debt, because the price increases of education are off the chart. And the reason for that is not
just that private schools jacked up rates (which they did) but it's also that the public sector
(and most American college students, for example, go to public colleges, not private ones)
the state legislators weren't going to tax the rich, therefore didn't have the money didn't
give it to the university, which in response jacked up the fees it charged the students,
who therefore had to borrow because their income and that of their parents wasn't going up.
You begin to see what this picture is filling out to show us.