What caused American wage stagnation?

What caused American wage stagnation?

Who is to blame? Nixon?

Capitalism?

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Schizophrenic scientist John Nash tainted the research with his mental illness, the Neocons and their British counterparts came up with the plan, Reagan and Thatcher pulled the trigger on implementing policy, the rest of the political establishment refused to stop it, the upper class endorsed it, and society accepted it.

There you go.

Globalisation.


This is a pretty Holla Forums tier response, but with leftypol leanings.

Fellow Adam Curtis fan?

…yep.

Right, but the US has been capitalist since 1776. What changed?

There's multiple factors. One major one is that the corporate structures shifted to be entirely devoted to the shareholders, previously we had a system more similar to what the Germans have today, with employees, management, customers, and shareholders all pushing their interests. Shareholders only care about making money, and usually have no connection to the company, and probably don't even know they own part of it since most people have mutual funds. It's interesting when you look back at Henry Ford. He paid his workers way more than he needed to, and had a creepily paternal relationship with them and would visit their homes to make sure they were speaking English and being American enough. To ford today their workers are little more than cogs.

Another big thing was the fall of the USSR.. While it was around the labor movement could point to Russia and say"you want that to happen here?". But once it started collapsing we moved into an era of "there is no alternative so i guess I'll just deal."

And you should talk to people who worked in the 60s and early 70s. Unemployment was not an issue. People showed up to work drunk all the time, would demand higher and higher wages (one of the big factors that caused the inflation of the later part of that petiod), and would generally be assholes because they could always just get another job. The lack of insecurity was also one factor in all the protests and counter cultural movements at the time. The man didn't like all that so he wages stagnant and raised housing and education costs so people would be more in line.

pic related happened

I was shilling for him in the tumblr infiltration thread. What a guy. I love Bitter Lake, but haven't thought of what to call it. I'd say art documentary but then it sounds like a documentary about art.

He's pretty baller. I wish that more people knew of his work.

explain this, where can I read on it


other national capitals besides the US competing with US capital for both manufacturing and markets

Watch Adam Curtis' The Trap

It began in the early 70s, though.


This makes much more sense.

The mid 70s was when rightist economists like Milton Friedman started to gain traction and the government turned against Keynesianism.
Then this porky motherfucker came along and convinced everyone in America that inflation was the biggest problem with the economy and that unemployment can be good for the economy because it weakens the workers bargaining power.
With unions in decline both major parties in America no longer had a reason to care about the working class, which is also how big business was able to take over politics so easily.
A good introductory book on the subject is Stayin Alive by Jefferson Cowie- although the book also has a lot of idpol in it, so it's not really Holla Forums approved.

Capital always accumulates at the top. That's the entire point of business. In a healthy capitalist economy (if you will entertain such a fiction for a moment), this capital is replaced by reinvestment by banks into things like industry or whatever. Consumers need wages in order to consume, otherwise they're just beggars.

The sole occupying drive of any business is profit, that wealth accumulation, and corporations are legally obligated to maximize profit for shareholders. If they do anything else then the shareholders can sue the CEO of the company for failure to fulfill his obligations.

For the corporation, wages are simply an expense. You might hear some nonsense about "investing in employees" but it's bullshit. Every penny paid to employees is one cent less going to the shareholders and they will cut the throat of the worker's baby to get it. This is one of the many reasons we see this boom and bust cycle (if lucky enough).

Whatever a corporation is selling, eventually the rate of profit declines. They reach market saturation, for instance: everyone already has an ipod so there is very little growth. Or because of the initial profitability of the market imitators have driven down the value of the product. Labor discounts on production in country A leave the producers in country B at a disadvantage and so forth.

But the corporation is obligated to do everything possible to make that number keep going up ad infinitum. Whether it's the first thing they cut or the last, eventually worker wages will suffer. When that happens you begin to see capital drain from the economy. We used to solve this problem with Keynesian economics. The government would stimulate the economy, refilling it with capital, by putting money directly into the workers' hands. This was the New Deal and it was astonishingly successful and popular.

Now, though, all the money the government prints goes directly into the hands of the corporations under the laughable theory that they'll use it to expand and employ more people. Instead they just take the money and buy up their own shares to drive up their stock prices which makes them even more wealthy. Meanwhile, their workers are kept on the bare minimum needed to survive, if even that.

Nobody was forcing capitalists to give people decent pay any more. There are a number of factors that contributed to this.
…among others. That's off the top of my head.

The graph is misleading because of when it starts. If it went back to 1776 you'd see a lot more wage stagnation. The real question you should be asking is "why did wages grow with productivity for a brief period during the 20th century?" and the answer to that is leftism in the US pushing for fair wages. The stagnation occurred when things went back to normal after the bourgeoisie neutered American leftism.

Wages are politically determined through labour-capital antagonism. Sure, the general given level of social needs and average productivity of spheres producing consumer goods set a certain structure to wage fluctuations but wages are elastic. Productivity increases allowed wages to stagnate while living standards remained solid. Later, the regularization of consumer debt was able to artcificially drive wages below the value of labour-power.

Decades of political counter-revolution, productivity increases in the wave of 70s globalization, and normalization of debt all played into wage stagnation.