Tag Archives: labor share

Why do we think the world is about to see the resurrection of the “comrade culture club” over the next ten years?  Make no mistake; there will be a visceral political reaction to the coming acceleration of labor disrupting technology. We got a little taste of it in the 2016 election. Just wait until it hits the doctoring, lawyering, and accounting class.... Technology replaced the farmers. Now it is coming for the industrial workers and many types of service workers, too. Soldiers and...

David Ricardo. EconospeakNo Other Way of Keeping Profits Up Sandwichman See also Michael KaleckiPolitical Aspects of Full Employment Political Quarterly, 1943  also Iron Law of Wages Wikipedia

Total income earned can be divided into what is earned by labor in wages, salaries, and benefits, and what is earned by capital in profits and interest payments. The line between these categories can be a blurry: for example, should the income received by someone running their own business be counted as "labor" income received for their hours worked, or as "capital" income received from their ownership of the business, or some mixture of both?However, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics has...

The rules of the global economy are rigged against those who have to work to earn a living, and in favour of multinational corporations and the ultra-rich. It is no accident that, as Oxfam has revealed, the richest 1% own more wealth than the rest of humanity combined. This is inequality by design. The world is facing a huge decent work deficit, and the rules of the global economy need to change. The just-so story of economic liberalism is that economics is a natural science and economics...

"Immiseration" has a nice quality to it and is less emotionally loaded than "exploitation," which is now associated with "Marxism" in the pejorative sense in capitalist countries like the US. It’s clear that, for decades now, American workers have been falling further and further behind. And there’s simply no justification for this sorry state of affairs—nothing that can rationalize or excuse the growing gap between the majority of people who work for a living and the tiny group at the...

Back in April, I wrote about one of the most troubling mysteries in economics, the falling labor share. Less of the income the economy produces is going to people who work, and more is going to people who own things.... Mystery to morons conventional economists maybe.Here, Noah, read this: Michal Kalecki, "Political Aspects of Full Employment" (Political Quarterly, 1943). It's even posted at Brad DeLong's site.It's a feature of capitalism, or a bug, depending on which side one is on. The...

The two standard explanations for why labor’s share of output has fallen by 10 percent over the past 30 years are globalization (American workers are losing out to their counterparts in places like China and India) and automation (American workers are losing out to robots). Last year, however, a highly-cited Stigler Center paper by Simcha Barkai offered another explanation: an increase in markups. The capital share of GDP, which includes what companies spend on equipment like robots, is...