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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

Increased stratification started when incomes decoupled from productivity growth in ~1979. That was caused by a wave of union busting.

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It also corresponded with massive illegal and legal immigration entering the labor force of over 50 million individuals (unions were always against immigration for the labor supply competition reason). In addition, there was not a commensurate increase in housing stock in many urban centers and areas leading to more of your income swallowed by rich landlords.

To be fair the immigrants have a much better life in the US, and if you're worried about the US population dropping, boy would it have dropped more without that immigration wave.

My theory has always been that the decoupling was due to the effects of exponential population growth becoming more linear in the 50s (and taking ~20yrs to kick in). When population growth is exponential everyone has opportunity to "move up the ladder". As the growth rate flattens, demand drops and things get more competitive. This combined with an economic/fiscal focus on GDP and "the stock market" meant workers wages had to bear the brunt, thus leading to a number of things like union busting.

>That was caused by a wave of union busting.

Are you presenting this as opinion or fact?

This question surprised me. In that any one could read a random comment on the internet as anything other than opinion? There most certainly arguments to be in support or against (Reagan busting up the air traffic controllers is an easy example from that era) but the entire notion is clearly one sided and clearly not fact.

>In that any one could read a random comment on the internet as anything other than opinion?

Maybe? eg. something like "subprime mortgages caused the 2008 recession" would qualify as a fact. Maybe what the parent poster said was the academic consensus among labor economists, or is at least a serious competing theory among mainstream academics (ie. not something that only a few marxist economists believe).

Without significant context, your "fact" is not worth much.

I'm puzzled by this comment. You're seemingly trying to explain a secular trend sweeping across the Western world by pointing to a single short-term event that occurred in the U.S. and was but tangentially related to what's actually going on (returns to highly skilled labor have been going up, not down as we might expect from union busting activity!) That doesn't really make much sense, tbh.

The causal event for that was the discovery that the USSR was a hollow giant and the red scare not based in reality. After that communism lost alot of its fear-factor and a take-over was becoming ever more unlikely.

Wow, that is not the way I remember 1979...

Time to hit the history books. 1980s the fear propaganda was still strong, but the three letter agencies had enough material to pass judgment on the USSR.

Example: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1240452

The USSR bought grain when its harvests failed during the 1970s - this is not the action of a superior system about to surpass you and replace you.

The three letter agencies may have known better, but they weren't setting wages for the country. And, as you said, "the fear propaganda was still strong". So I don't think your position can logically work if 1979 is the year things started to change for wages.

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