Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

This problem is visible in the precarity of gig work, and the treatment of employees as fungible assets to be controlled through management algorithms. But its clearest manifestation lies in how the rewards are doled out. Economists have long tried to understand how equitable a labour market is by looking at what share of a country’s income goes to workers, and what share goes to the owners of capital – through stock gains, dividends and corporate profits. The story of the last 50 years is striking. Between 1980 and 2014, labour’s share of national income – the percentage of GDP paid out in wages, salaries and benefits – declined on average by 6.5 per cent, as measured in 34 advanced economies. In the US, the decline has been even more staggering. In 1947, workers received 65 per cent of the national income in America; by 2018, this had declined to 56.7 per cent. More than three-quarters of the decline since the end of World War Two occurred in the first two decades of the millennium. For decades, workers have been systematically getting a smaller share of the economic pie.75