Income Was Stagnant Way Before The Recession Started : Planet Money : NPR
It’s not entirely clear why household income should have remained stagnant during all those years when the U.S. economy was growing and top earners were seeing their incomes rise.
Earlier this summer, the FT laid out three of the leading theories (emphasis added):
The rise of China, India, Brazil and othersn has undercut wages in the west and put America’s unskilled, semi-skilled and even skilled workers out of jobs.
…the explosion of new technology, which has enabled the most routine and easily automated jobs to be replaced by computers. Think of the office assistant, who once took dictation and brewed the coffee. She is now a BlackBerry …
…the conservative backlash which began when Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980, and which sped up the decline of unions and reversed the most progressive features of the US tax system.
Update: I messed up my html and hid part of the quoted material from FT/PlanetMoney. Fixed, for what it is worth.
