End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

by Peter Turchin

A 2021 article by Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens provides further evidence that wage suppression between 1979 and 2017 was due to a shifting balance of power, not to automation and technological changes. Mishel and Bivens identify the following factors that together accounted for three-fourths of the divergence between productivity and median hourly compensation growth: Austerity macroeconomics, including facilitating unemployment higher than it needed to be to keep inflation in check, and responding to recessions with insufficient force; Corporate-driven globalization, resulting from policy choices, largely at the behest of multinational corporations, that undercut wages and job security of noncollege-educated workers while protecting profits and the pay of business managers and professionals; Purposely eroded collective bargaining, resulting from judicial decisions, and policy choices that invited ever more aggressive anti-union business practices; Weaker labor standards, including a declining minimum wage, eroded overtime protections, nonenforcement against instances of “wage theft,” or discrimination based on gender, race, and/or ethnicity; New employer-imposed contract terms, such as agreements not to compete after leaving employment and to submit to forced private and individualized arbitration of grievances; and Shifts in corporate structures, resulting from fissuring (or domestic outsourcing), industry deregulation, privatization, buyer dominance affecting entire ...