> The share of U.S. economic output that's paid out in wages in at the lowest
> point since the government started keeping track of it. In 1964 AT&T was worth
> $267 billion in today's dollars and employed 758,611 people. Google is worth
> $370 billion but has only about 55,000 employees -- less than a tenth the size
> of AT&T's workforce in its heyday.
I think this might be an interesting statistic to look at but I can't find it. I can find Gross Domestic Income (GDI) and the GDP which the Bureau of Economic Analysis (
http://www.bea.gov) seems to think GDI has been about ~50% of GDP for a long time. I'm also having a bit of a challenge evaluating your numbers, yes Google has a high market cap relative to its workforce, but its contribution to GDP is only about $90B/year (not the Market Cap, but the revenue) and its 55,000 employees accounted for about a third of that. So its pumping into the economy. AT&T had revenue of $164B, not quite double that, and higher employment costs as well. It certainly
has been remarkable how much money Google, Apple, and a small number of companies have pulled out of the economy and into cash. Depending on how you measure it you can make an argument that is the entire source of unemployment in the current US economy. I expect at some point various governments will note this impact and construct the Tech equivalent of 'windfall profits tax' (maybe 'unproductive capital tax' or something) in order to liberate it into the economy.
> If you had a functional body, you could get a good job.
If you are saying that you
only needed a functional body to get a good job, that has not been true for at least 50 years. The amount of education and training needed to be employable has gone up steadily as new job creation happened in industries that were growing.
> I think right now we have an absolute glut of educated people;
We need to be careful about terms, there are many people who have college degrees for which there is no career path other than perhaps teaching people who would like to get that same degree. They are 'educated' and essentially unemployable because the number of teaching positions is small relative to the available candidates. But working it backwards from the job to the employee does work, there are unfilled jobs available for people where there is also training available to teach people to do those jobs. Some are 'college' jobs and require STEM training, some are trades jobs and require skills training.