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Based on vast capital accumulation to a small cohort [1], I believe they do know how wealth is being created. They're simply improving quality of life for the people doing the actual work. Conversely, its terrifying (at least to me) that there are people who endorse the dystopian status quo.

[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2020/december/has-weal...

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What worries me is that the stagnant wages have been caused by globalization making our labor relatively unattractive compared to the rest of the world. This will only make our labor more unattractive, accelerating the loss of our dwindling manufacturing base.

This exactly. The U.S. economy doesn’t exist in a competition-free vacuum. This “solution” would hurt those at the left side of the income/wealth distribution the most, but would hurt all of the U.S. to some degree.

Or they have looked at charts like this, understand why the US is to the right but have no reason to think (and plenty of domestic research on per-working-hour productivity to support) that the factors that create the overall trend line apply to the US:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/productivity-vs-annual-ho...

It is far more terrifying that some believe you can make simple adjustments to complex systems with no unintended consequences.

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