Real pay going up 1% per year for 18 years means that it has gone up 19.61% since the year 2000. Another great example of statistics being framed to elicit a certain response.
> In most rich countries, real pay has grown by at most 1% per year, on average, since 2000.
The next sentence breaks out one piece of that average:
> For low-wage workers the stagnation has been more severe and prolonged: between 1979 and 2016, pay adjusted for inflation for the bottom fifth of American earners barely rose at all.
2. Property prices have multiple other factors affecting them than just GDP. For instance, if you have a large increase in population without enough new housing to account for it, then property prices naturally go up. I think that describes 21st century Britain quite well, don't you?
3. The economic dogma of blaming all problems on the rich is no different than blaming all problems on a certain ethnic group. It's just that it's not as easy to immediately recognize it as intellectually dishonest.
I'd argue that the over-centralisation of the UK economy is a big part of the problem there; there should be as much investment in public transport in Manchester and Birmingham as there is in London.
Edit: Also, who has said they hate the rich? Stop propping up silly YouTube strawmen for you to take down with your logic lording.
You do realize that the first half of your sentence is identical to a extreme nationalist argument against an ethnic group, don't you? All you would have to do is start it off with "The [insert ethnic group] are people who live in extreme comfort..."
It's the metric by which you stereotype people. You're just making my point for me.
I think you are most likely confusing the petite bourgeoisie (the vast majority of programmers) with the haute bourgeoisie (the monopolistic owners of our means of production, think Bezos).
The petty bourgeoisie are well off, and look to emulate and think of themselves as similar to a haute bourgeoisie like Elon Musk, but they are not, your 200,000 a year salary is closer to your porters 30k salary and you often work alongside your workers/coworkers. Our owners of the means of production, such as Tim Cooke cornering the high end hardware market, do not work alongside their employees. They view workers in the abstract, as literal numbers on paper.
It is much easier for say people like Zuckerberg and Schmidt to collude, because it’s a lot fewer people to coordinate. And this in fact happened with wage fixing in Silicon Valley between tech companies until they were caught.
I don’t know what the answer is, and it’s especially fraught in a world economy where unionizing in the USA may mean that Google simply highers programmers in Eastern Europe instead. But I do know that government should be leveraged for the people and not for big business, that’s its point and that’s currently not the case.
That's what real pay growth means: Nominal minus inflation.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/188105/annual-gdp-of-the...
19.61% increase in wages seems like a lot but if you factor in housing prices increased 100%+, prices of steaks increased 200%, etc, then that 19.61% doesn't look too good.
In fact it was voted as one of the most trustworthy sources.
You make it sound like some sensationalist rag.