Comment by CGMthrowaway

3 hours ago

>the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed, but the overall pie has grown massively around us

I don't see where the article made that claim. Are you making it yourself and can you support it? That sounds like something that would happen when technology improves. What the article does do, is pose a question that it never answers: "When the labor share falls, it means that productivity, prices, or both [which?] are growing faster than wages."

The Fed tracks this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=tjto

Unit cost on labor has increased at a more or less steady pace this whole time. Ergo, it's not so much that labor is decreasing as other things are increasing faster.

It's hard to argue that technology is increasing labor productivity an order of magnitude faster than it was in the 50s. It's more likely something else in the dataset (returns on capital/rent) is exploding in value.