This ended abruptly in the early 1970s, when wages decoupled from improvements to productivity – which now only fed the incomes of the very highest earners. This phenomenon extended beyond just the US. A 2014 report showed how real wage growth in Britain has been on a downward trend for forty years, with wages increasing an annual 2.9 per cent in the 1970s and 80s, 1.5 per cent in the 1990s, and 1.2 per cent in the 2000s. Since the 2008 crisis that incremental decline has gone into free-fall, with real household wages in Britain falling 10.4 per cent between 2007 and 2015, something entirely
...more
