I think a better way to look at it is: people paying to park wealth in the worlds most stable and transferable currency. Even North Korea likes holding US dollars.
We have the most stable, predictable economic environment in the world, and the oldest functioning constitution. Why would we not extract some of the value in that?
Another point: Inflation plays a domestic role as well, as it increases the velocity of money.
It's definitely fantastic for anyone with employees. If the currency was deflating, you better believe your boss would be doing a downward cost of living adjustment ever single paycheck. As it stands, they can just keep your pay fixed and you are constantly becoming a lesser business cost until they begrudgingly give you a 1-2% annual cost of living adjustment.
Basically, it's easier to manipulate individuals into working for less if the number they're getting remains the same or even goes up, but slower than real inflation.
> Basically, it's easier to manipulate individuals into working for less if the number they're getting remains the same or even goes up, but slower than real inflation.
I could be wrong, but it looks like that is comparing an aggregate/mean ('total productivity's) with a median ('typical wage'), which would paint a very innaccurate picture of what's happening.
Like, imagine everything stays the same, but a new class of extremely productive high paying jobs is invented, and grows to 10% of the workforce. This would have only a marginal effect on median wage but a huge effect on aggregate productivity. Nothing would change in any other industry (bread factories still have the same output and still pay the same) but it would make this stat look like like 'the rich are stealing our wage growth'.
