The article itself mentions the impact on the economy. It also mentions productivity steadily increasing since 1948.

So... productivity has been going up for decades, with purchasing power of average wages steadily declining over the same period.

Maybe I'm just missing something, but this sounds to me like maybe the issue with the economy isn't the hypothetical, average American worker. Maybe the economic issue is actually some outliers in these data sets. Some outliers that contribute little to the productivity metric but disproportionately impact the various economic metrics.

Hrm. Wonder what group of people that might be...