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Then how do you explain personal income at an all time high?
No one is jumping up and down, celebrating that GDP is at an all time high. We expect it to climb. In fact if it doesn't, we have a special name. It's called a recession.
This used to be true of real wages as well. Over our history until the mid '70s, median wages have kept up with per capita GDP, on average. But after it became painfully obvious to nearly everyone in 2008 that wages have sucked for 30 years, we were inundated by all this apologetic BS that we needed to be happy with any tiny rise at all. And look, now you have computers and cell phones! Isn't that great?
If median wages had kept pace with per capita GDP and productivity over the last 40 years, we'd be ~70% richer than we are.
I have no idea why you would expect wages to increase at the same rate as productivity. We know that there have been huge increases in productivity due to computers, automation, and a variety of other factors not related to human labor. Clearly those increases have required expenses for hardware, computers and software.
Your chart does show an interesting change. Females are being compensated at an increasingly higher level. So a small extent, society is now treating women more fairly and paying closer to parity but there are a lot of other reasons. To put it another way: men are falling behind and will continue to do so as the workplace and our society changes.
I have no idea why you would expect wages to increase at the same rate as productivity. We know that there have been huge increases in productivity due to computers, automation, and a variety of other factors not related to human labor. Clearly those increases have required expenses for hardware, computers and software.
Every expense is someone's salary.
Basic econ: productivity is precisely what makes us richer. It is the rising tide. And in consumer capitalism, these gains need to be shared else the system stalls.
The only reason we haven't gotten richer over the last 40 years is because the rich oligarchs hatched a scheme (using globalization) where they could successfully take all the productivity gains.
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