One thing jumps out in my mind. I think of the 2000s as being the decade in which tech companies that survived the dot com bust turned into tech giants. And these companies would go on to rack up market caps that broke historical records. I remember everyone was sort of in awe of the numbers and generally had a pretty positive sentiment towards the success. However, I'm not sure I can craft a really clear narrative that connects this back to stagnant wages. But it seems related. Perhaps in the sense that large corporations like the tech giants seemed to be free to monopolize and suck up all the money without allowing it to circulate in the economy.
The tech giants may have just been a particular touch stone in a long trend of increased, unchecked corporatization of US business. Perhaps that culminated in a kind of phase transition that took place in the 2000s.
But there's another interesting detail to that chart which is that wages appear to be back on track since 2010 and have trended upward pretty sharply since then compared to the 2000s. If the slope of the wage line is to be believed (and were to continue), we'd be in pretty good shape in another decade or so. So, to play devil's advocate, perhaps it's wrong to look sideways at some of the big players in the space right now. I don't know. Not an economist.
My memory is hazy, but iirc Alan Greenspan brought out a lot of easy money in response to the dotcom bubble bursting, which then helped inflate the housing bubble.
> I remember everyone was sort of in awe of the numbers and generally had a pretty positive sentiment towards the success. However, I'm not sure I can craft a really clear narrative that connects this back to stagnant wages. But it seems related.
The relation I can think of is the tech giants obviating away many instances of labor that were being sold.
Email, travel agents, streaming, GPS mapping apps, etc all let people do a lot more with the labor of a lot fewer.
But that is not solely the domain of tech giants or tech companies. Automation has been happening for decades, along with outsourcing to countries with cheaper labor.
Since prices (wages) stayed stagnant, one can conclude that the supply of labor increased more than the demand for labor.
Edit: another factor increasing supply of labor is women joining the workforce
The tech giants may have just been a particular touch stone in a long trend of increased, unchecked corporatization of US business. Perhaps that culminated in a kind of phase transition that took place in the 2000s.
But there's another interesting detail to that chart which is that wages appear to be back on track since 2010 and have trended upward pretty sharply since then compared to the 2000s. If the slope of the wage line is to be believed (and were to continue), we'd be in pretty good shape in another decade or so. So, to play devil's advocate, perhaps it's wrong to look sideways at some of the big players in the space right now. I don't know. Not an economist.