The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level • Hacker News Board

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#361

Post by Teever » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 6:06 PM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #314

rsalus wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed not true, labor productivity has been steadily increasing: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB workers are simply capturing less of the economic value generated by their labor.

Increases in labor productivity is a curious thing to think about. Do I deserve more wages for using AutoCad instead of drafting paper? - The amount I'm working hasn't increased. Still an 8 hour day. - My job honestly is easier than it used to be; certainly less menial. - Strictly speaking, the education requirement is actually lower . It's easier and a lower bar to learn to become a decent designer in AutoCad than t…

Thats a good list of questions here’s another good thought provoking line of thinking:

As someone trading labour for a wage should I adjust my productivity to match the tools I’m using? That is to say if I’m using CAD should I bother using the tool to raise my productivity? Or should I just match my old hand drafting productivity rates? Should I attempt to raise my productivity rates with these new tools to meet or exceed the best rates from my coworkers?

What can we do to align my interests with those of my employer?

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#362

Post by throwway120385 » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 6:10 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #54

throwway120385 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't a single-payer solution work? The margin that the insurance companies take for themselves seems like a good place to start. From there it would spiral out to the third to half of time that all of the clinical staff spend just dealing with insurance issues and insurance billing.

insurance issues are provider and insurer going back and forth detrmining if doctors assessment of necessity is agreed upon. i am not familiar with universal system. In that system if your doctor thinks something is medically necessary then thats the end of it and its gets done?

In my experience, insurance issues are usually insurer and patient going back and forth and then patient getting 6 different answers from 6 different representatives, then reviewing the 3000 page plan document, finding the single line that properly describes what should have happened, calling the insurance company, explaining to the rep how your plan works, and demanding that it be reprocessed. Like my wife has to do this frequently and spends several hours per month dealing with this but she has saved us probably tens of thousands of dollars in mis-processed claims that the insurance companies can't even properly handle. I usually am the person carefully reading plan docs, finding the proper billing codes, and explaining things like that to the insurance company. Sometimes we have to get the doctor's billing people to code things, like once they coded something that was an outpatient appointment as a minor surgery which could have cost us a lot of money.

So in my book since we get to speculate about what the system should look like, it should absolutely result in people getting care without all of this run-around. It's about eliminating as much misery as possible from the system and letting people just get treated and providers just get paid. We can talk about efficiency once the misery is gone.

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#363

Post by jhoechtl » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 6:10 PM UTC

didgetmaster wrote: post #350

vannevar wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is consistent with the observation that the top 10% have captured a disproportionate share of GDP growth over the past few decades. https://equitablegrowth.org/new-data-reveal-how-u-s-economic... "The past three economic expansions have largely benefitted the top 10 percent. In each, the top decile received between 47 percent and 59 percent of all income growth in the expansion."

Every discussion about the 'top 10%' seems to make the underlying assumption that the set of people who fall under that category are consistent. While there are certainly individuals who enter the top 10% (or top 1%) and stay there; there are large numbers of people who move in and out of those categories. For me personally, I am in the top 10%; but a few decades ago, I was not.

This is a good point I haven't considered in the past and worth to take into the overall discussion.

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#364

Post by shimman » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 6:13 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #263

shimman wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay and what exactly do you get for that income? What are the material outcomes for having a "higher" income than Germany? Because I know very few people that would openly choose to live in Mississippi versus Germany.

The GP claimed that 50% of the US lives in abject poverty. Mississippi our poorest state compares with Germany in terms of median income and Mississippi itself does not suffer from 50% rate of abject poverty. So by extension the US as a whole doesn’t suffer from a 50% rate of abject poverty (begging, trinket selling, selling off relatives, shitting in public, etc.) rates of abject poverty. That’s stuff you’d see in t…

Okay so thank you for avoiding the question, once again what does a higher income in the southern US get you that people in Germany don't have?

People want healthcare, they want cheaper housing, they want high quality jobs, they want lower crime. Material outcomes absolutely matter and there is zero evidence to suggest that "high incomes" in the US translate to anything except more blood for corporations to extract.

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#365

Post by mghackerlady » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 6:13 PM UTC

didgetmaster wrote: post #350

vannevar wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is consistent with the observation that the top 10% have captured a disproportionate share of GDP growth over the past few decades. https://equitablegrowth.org/new-data-reveal-how-u-s-economic... "The past three economic expansions have largely benefitted the top 10 percent. In each, the top decile received between 47 percent and 59 percent of all income growth in the expansion."

Every discussion about the 'top 10%' seems to make the underlying assumption that the set of people who fall under that category are consistent. While there are certainly individuals who enter the top 10% (or top 1%) and stay there; there are large numbers of people who move in and out of those categories. For me personally, I am in the top 10%; but a few decades ago, I was not.

This is bourgeois idealism. In reality, the people in the top 10% remain there and rarely fall

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#366

Post by tancop » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 6:13 PM UTC

vondur wrote: post #351

vannevar wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is consistent with the observation that the top 10% have captured a disproportionate share of GDP growth over the past few decades. https://equitablegrowth.org/new-data-reveal-how-u-s-economic... "The past three economic expansions have largely benefitted the top 10 percent. In each, the top decile received between 47 percent and 59 percent of all income growth in the expansion."

Aren't most of the tech workers here part of that 10% and I'd assume they own houses in some of the most expensive areas, so they are technically part of the capital class?

defining classes is complicated. if you do it based on income percentile it will always be arbitrary and never reflect actual economic relations.

the most accepted way to divide in socialist circles is based off where your income comes from, your relation to capital. if you have to work for someone else thats working class (proletariat), if you can be independent you are professional or middle class, if you own the means of production for others that makes you a capitalist. owning a house is only capital class if you rent it out.

from that pov almost all tech workers are professional or working class. with founder ceos its more complicated because they own capital but also work for themselves through their company so you can take them as either. i guess it depends on if you like that person.

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#367

Post by rsalus » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 6:14 PM UTC

larkost wrote: post #354

missedthecue wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increases in labor productivity is a curious thing to think about. Do I deserve more wages for using AutoCad instead of drafting paper? - The amount I'm working hasn't increased. Still an 8 hour day. - My job honestly is easier than it used to be; certainly less menial. - Strictly speaking, the education requirement is actually lower . It's easier and a lower bar to learn to become a decent designer in AutoCad than t…

> Or should the innovators, firms, and customers all get less, and instead my wages should get bigger? In almost all of the cases the "innovators" are themselves workers whose share of the outcome has been dropping. And the "customers" have never gotten a piece of the profits; we are already past the point where reduced prices would have happened (competition) in this system. And I think that by "firms" you really me…

the argument is productivity gains are increasingly driven by technological advances, which are spurred by capital investment. for example, if a company purchases software that increases their accountants productivity by 5x, should those accountants immediately be paid 4-5x more?

I would contend that the accountant should not - it should flow to who bore the cost of the input (capital owners). however, if you starve labor of those gains, it destroys the consumer base that capital relies on to buy its goods and services. therefore, society requires broad wealth distribution to function, which implies some level of redistribution by the state is needed.

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#368

Post by saghm » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 6:16 PM UTC

robinsonb5 wrote: post #250

saghm wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To the extent that healthcare costs have skyrocketed, it's precisely because of government intervention in the U.S. Healthcare industry has massively increased over the last 50 years, especially in the form of tax incentives for employers to compensate employees by way of health insurance. It fails to follow logically that one specific way the government got involved that drove costs up means that any possible inte…

The problem is, quite simply, insurance. When something is paid for from a big nebulous ball of money rather than straight out of people's pockets, the downward pressure on prices just isn't there in the same way. The conversations between practitioners and insurers are about whether something is necessary, not about whether or not the practitioner is charging too much for it. Here in the UK we see it, too - not so m…

> Here in the UK we see it, too - not so much in human healthcare since we have the NHS - but very definitely in animal healthcare; vets' bills have skyrocketed over the last couple of decades, in a mutually-reinforcing feedback loop with the rise in pet health insurance.

Kind of amazing how perfectly this illustrates that in the exact same economy, the system with single payer mostly works to keep prices sane, and the private insurance model goes off the rails

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#369

Post by cherryteastain » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

vannevar wrote: post #139

legitster wrote: post #61

People are misreading the conclusion - the Covid related drop is normal and matches previous episodes, but the massive overall drop since 2000 is not. The situation on the ground is unchanged - the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed, but the overall pie has grown massively around us.

This is consistent with the observation that the top 10% have captured a disproportionate share of GDP growth over the past few decades. https://equitablegrowth.org/new-data-reveal-how-u-s-economic... "The past three economic expansions have largely benefitted the top 10 percent. In each, the top decile received between 47 percent and 59 percent of all income growth in the expansion."

"Top 10%" is such a misleading slice here. The guy who's at the 9.99th percentile is a normal salaried worker not doing better. The gains are entirely concentrated in the tiny billionaire slice buried inside that 10%. In fact wage growth for the top decile has been recently slower than bottom deciles [1]. Incomes still grow fast in the top decile, but mostly due to assets. And those assets are disproportionately in the hands of the billionaire slice of that top decile.

[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/strong-wage-growth-for-low-w...

Re: The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level

#370

Post by dematz » Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #294

dematz wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth I know you've worked on FHIR and probably know a lot of details I don't. Actually I'd be interested in talking to you about FHIR. That said! 1) In the big picture isn't the US clearly paying more than other countries? I'm sure some of this is eg a janitor in the US costs more than a janitor elsewhere, but still... 2) Isn't the cap for the margin that insurance companies can take 20%? That is, they…

I've worked on a lot of healthcare interoperability standards, including HL7 FHIR. Those can be part of the solution in terms of making the system operate more efficiently and cutting administrative overhead. In many cases payer and provider organizations are still doing things manually that could be automated using existing standards. But they fail to do so due to lack of vision and insufficient technical resources.…

Admin inefficiencies between orgs definitely exist and maybe better interoperability and standards is the solution, but wouldn't there also be less of a problem in the first place if there were fewer different orgs all complicating workflows?

Also not saying you're wrong about many healthcare services being unnecessary or even harmful, and someone has to be the one to say no to patients asking for low value care which is definitely a real hard position to be in and a real problem. At the same time insurance companies aren't making a great case for themselves as the solution imo bring on the government death panels.