And i'm sure the story for the bottom 50% of employees is even worse.
The trend is downwards, and the internet accelerated it. Does anyone think that robots and a massive technology boom that may soon happen won't accelerate it ? Why ?
And from that trend, given minimum wage, it seems that at some point in time, we'll have large unemployment.
Look at businesses being dominated by companies that can afford high fixed costs in order to gain huge economies of scale. Good luck opening a mom-and-pop grocery next to a Wal-Mart, or even an independent gas station within two miles of a Sheetz.
However we do not live in a society with static rules. Corporations and to a lesser extent individuals are constantly competing and lobbying to get rules changes in their favor, look at the current net neutrality fight. If workers have an ever decreasing share of GDP then they have an ever decreasing amount of power with which to counter that lobbying or lobby for themselves, and it's the sort of thing that can snowball
Example: even when corrected for purchasing power, the vast majority of people on earth are poorer than the bottom 10% in the US. Yet they tend to do much better on those measures above than absolute definition of poverty would suggest.
That does not preclude GDP from growing as iPhones are still selling and Google searches are still returning ads.
Concentration of wealth leads to the ability to outcompete any small business, increasing the risk of operating independently. It's like playing blackjack in a casino. Even if you could eke out a small statistical advantage, the house can stay solvent longer than you can through volatility (and that assumes an otherwise level legal/regulatory/lobbying framework).
Even Silicon Valley's startup culture implicitly acknowledges this - bootstrapped companies are a footnote. Only those companies with the financial resources of insanely wealthy investors stand a chance at mainstream success. That means the (decreasing proportion) of insanely wealthy people have a growing amount of say in what companies are allowed to succeed.
Perhaps seizing the means of production is the way to go ;)
In all seriousness though, Even starting a small business requires a decently large buffer that most people simply don't have. Hard to build one if you're surviving on mimimum wage + food stamps. Living paycheck to paycheck is a real thing. Especially if you have family
It's very common, we've seen it with e.g. internet providers here; big international ISP takes over one of the major cable companies here, they invest heavily in marketing and go under the price of competitors - and thanks to billions in investment money they can keep that up for years -, the competitors lose money and customers until eventually the big one takes over. Monopoly, and then they start increasing the price again. 5-10 year plans. Amazon can do the same with businesses. Walmart, Target, etc all took local businesses and the middle class out of business when they landed in towns.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-key-to-jobs-in-the-future-is-not-...