Due to manufacturing outsourcing, labor laws favoring employers, denigration of workers' unions, etc.
Once upon a time, in the US's 'golden time' of the 1950s-1960s an ordinary blue-collar worker on the production-line at Ford or GM could afford a good car, a good house, good vacations, eating out or at home on steaks, on a wage sufficient for all of those as well as support a stay-at-home wife and probably three children.
Today you have that guy and his wife, both working, and at possibly more than one job unable to afford to buy any house and a good car, living on cheap groceries and ground beef, and who certainly couldn't afford more than one or two kids. So obviously wages have not kept pace with the increases in the cost of living. To have kept pace with cost increases, a blue-collar worker would be earning at least about $150 grand a year. That ain't happening.
Which is stupidity for the big corporations. If their workers (and other companies' workers) can't afford their own products, sales will be nowhere. They haven't listened to Henry Ford who deliberately paid the workers making his cars enough wages that they could afford to buy the cars that they had built themselves.
Real wages haven't been STAGNANT. They have deliberately been REDUCED. And that is bad for the country.
=== https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/employ...
"The average weekly earnings of factory production workers surpassed the $100 mark in June 1963," - in 1963 $100 was a touch under the value of three ounces of gold - in 2023 that amount of gold (at $1900 per ounce) is worth $5428 (or about $270,000 per year). In 1963 $100 would buy about 55 barrels of oil (at $1.80 per barrel) - in 2023 that amount of oil (at $89 per barrel) is worth $4944 (or about $247,000 a year).
FACTORY PRODUCTION WORKERS ARE NOT EARNING MORE THAN TWO-HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS PER YEAR.
My bet is that most people who grew up in the span of 80s-now are pretty content considering they make enough money to afford the basic necessities even if they have gotten a little bit more expensive, while on the flip side getting access to cheap fast internet and electronics, and by extension entertainment. Those with houses in area that got gentrified are also sitting pretty.
That being said, the kids that were born in 2010s are likely not going to see the same effect as they grew up with this standard. I don't place much faith in AI considering the current direction of improving LLMs in lieu of exploring architectures like Mu Zero.
- The yellow line seems to show that, while average hourly wages in current dollars have gone up linearly over time since the mid-1960s, and that may look basically like a good thing, this could be all attributable to inflation. This could sound scary I guess because of inflation, but then we turn to the green line.
- The green line shows that average hourly wages in current dollars have been basically flat since the mid-1960s. So, while inflation exists, basically the earning looks the same, numerically, if we adjust for it.
The mid-1960s is an interesting place to start the plot. It shows sort of the opposite of what I had expected to see, having seen the topic popularly treated on the web before. I clicked to see if the article discussed the graphic at the top of [0] in which:
- it appears that linear compensation growth tracked with linear productivity growth from 1948 to 1972 and
- after 1972, productivity began growing linearly, but compensation became (and remained) flat.
I'm not sure if the Pew author was making trying to make the topic more original or more palatable, but the author seems to be alluding to the same topic without pointing out the potentially helpful graphic for the related but different dataset.
This makes me wonder what the chart in the OP would look like if it went back further. Nonetheless, the points in the comment [1] appear to apply to [0] as well.
I think the answer to the question posed by the domain name at [0] might help answer the question in the OP. Do the additional charts help?
Post-WW2 was a unique time when the US emerged as the strongest economy with a solid industrial base, technological superiority and skilled workers that allowed it to leapfrog and stay ahead of the rest of the world in terms of worker output, productivity and wages.
Since then, the rest of the world, particularly Asia has caught up while the industrial base, education levels and skills of the average American worker hasn't grown by as much. In addition, women entered the workforce in major numbers in the 60s and 70s, so even for service jobs and other jobs that can only be done locally, there are now twice as many workers.
There's very little reason to hire a US worker when someone on the other side of the world can do the same job at the same or higher quality level at a lower cost structure. So, most US jobs are now in service sectors (e.g. food, retail, hospitality) that are low productivity, trades (e.g construction) that require local workers or in some niche sectors (govt, security) that aren't competing with external talent. The sectors where there have been high wage growth (e.g doctors, SW engineers) are either highly regulated or sufficiently new that they still not affected by global competition.
To change this, you can either upgrade the skills of your workforce or set up artificial barriers. The former high lag activity (i.e takes years to retrain your workforce)and there is often a cultural bias against STEM in the US. The latter helps in the short term but ultimately renders your economy uncompetitive (see EU economies that have seen their dominance shrink over the last 20 years)
edited: "most people" may have been too strong.