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> The chart above shows corporate profits going through the roof but at the same time labour income is INCREASING.

Actually if you graph real per capita labour income, it's decreasing. Labour income as a whole is only increasing because of inflation and population inflation.

Wow...

wouldn't have caught that.

Perfect example of that old saying...

"There are lies, damn lies... and then there are statistics."

The economy is also not a theoretical abstraction. Wealth disparity has rippling effects throughout society. If it's Pareto efficient that the super rich make 10x more and ordinary people make 1% more, it can still be sociologically undesirable.

What you see is an economy replete with goods and services, but by and large one in which the people getting rich neither make, consume, nor develop the technology to make those goods. It takes a special sort to see all the gains in wealth go to the investor and manager class and argue that this is the proper order of things.

> The economy is also not a theoretical abstraction.

Yes, thank you. Irritates me to hear people pontificate about the importance of "incentives" in the system, with the only real concern of economists being the overall increase in production and wealth. It's as if the distribution of wealth is of no concern whatsoever to economists and business people.

"It takes a special sort to see all the gains in wealth go to the investor and manager class and argue that this is the proper order of things."

I don't think anyone sees it as the proper order of things. For one thing, only central planners even think in those terms. For another, there is no obvious policy that will have a better overall result in a large country like the US -- remember, every policy has unintended consequences and doesn't always turn out like you plan.

I think when you ask everyone to get together to institute a society to create an environment in which business can exist, then reject the idea that it matters how the production of that society is distributed, that's a special sort of person.

Once you concede that it might be Pareto efficient, you've already lost. In the real world that's never the case. No one is (a) so spiteful that they will scuttle their supposed productivity because they are limited to $X Billion instead of $X+Y Billion, and (b) so important that no one will produce eqivalent value in their absence.

There not inflation adjusted as the real GDP has not quite tripled since 1972. http://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-inflation-adjusted/table Adjust for a 50% population growth over that time period and real per capita GDP is hardly moving.

  US Real GDP
  Dec 31, 2012	13.67 trillion (43,600 per person)
  Dec 31, 1972	4.75 trillion (23,750 per person)

Add to that the increasing wealth inequality and the bottom 75% are not doing much better now vs 1972. Congressional Budget Office report indicating that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income for the middle of the income distribution rose 21%, while for the top 0.1% it rose by 400%.

PS: The problem with looking at the stock market value is it responds to far more than just the expected future dividends. When bonds are paying 1% a dividend stock returning 3$ a share is worth a lot more than that same stock when bonds are paying 4%. Dividends are a much more useful when doing economic analysis.

The core claim of that comment is built upon guesswork, of a highly dubious sort at that:

"It's not noted if these are nominal gains or inflation adjusted gains. Given the dip in 2009, I think these are real gains"

Seriously? Seeing a tenfold gain in labour income in the graph, taking it to be in real terms is the more plausible option?

Here's an inflation-adjusted graph, albeit not (I think) of quite the same data:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Dist...

I think the point of the article is that the "Bush cuts" arrived because they promised more and better jobs. Yet 99% of that went to the corporations' own profit and to the top guys there. It kills the illusion that wealth people and corporations are "job creators" so we need to cut their taxes more.

99% is factually false. http://www.policymic.com/articles/3701/who-really-benefited-...

Ignores social security and is thus meaningless.

PS: Millions of 'Disabled' workers benefit from social security which is far more a social program than a retirement program.

"Trade only happens if its mutually beneficial for BOTH parties"

That is not true. People often trade out of need, and a lot of time, desperation. It is not mutually beneficial. That notion is so wrong I am not sure how to begin refuting it.

Mutually beneficial does not mean "perfect". Lots of trade may be unfair, especially in hindsight, but at the time the trade occurred, each party sees benefit in the trade. Otherwise, why would they trade?

because they are forced into a series of incremental trades that are not globally optimal across a lifetim, and cannot do things like borrow now and pay back later at mutually profitable rates, due to lender uncertainty.

That comment is missing the fact that IF the top 1% are having huge growth in wealth AND the 99% are having tiny growth then perhaps we could tweak matters so that the growth in wealth, which we can clearly see by examining the whole picture, is not quite so lopsided.

I don't care if there are people with 100's of millions of dollars but when I know their wealth is increasing at very fast rate it makes me think they'll be okay if we 'level' the playing field

Doesn't that rely on the assumption that gains are uniformly easy to generate across the income spectrum?

As a thought experiment, imagine you had a million dollars and wanted to use it to make more money. Then imagine you have a thousand. Isn't it much easier to make money, when you already have money? Things like diversification, favored rates on investment and economies of scale/scope only appear at the upper end of investment. While we may be able to tweak things, the fact remains that gains may just be easier to come by at the upper end of the spectrum.

> The economy is not a zero sum game, where if the rich make a trillion more it comes out of the pockets of the workers. This notion is childish and wrong.

I'm genuinely curious about this point. Every dollar in pay I cut from my worker's salary is a dollar more in my company's pocket, isn't it?

Edit: nope, I'm silly.

It looks like the entire comment is the quote - the only closing " I can see is at the very end.

You're right, turns out I am the one jumping to conclusions here. Or, in this case, missing the positioning of a quote mark.