The Struggle to Explain Things That Didn't Happen: The Non-Existent Shift Away from Wages

I see Noah Smith is struggling to explain "the mystery of labor's falling share of GDP." At the risk of jeopardizing good paying jobs for people with PhDs in economics, let me suggest that there is no mystery to explain.

Noah's piece features a graph showing the labor share of GDP declining from a range of 64 to 65 percent in the 1960s and early 1970s to just over 60 percent in the most recent data. He then gives us several possible explanations for this drop. Let me give an alternative one,...