A lot of this has to do with employer provided health insurance and ballooning healthcare costs, which are fairly specific problems to the US.
Housing and education costs have also increased much faster than overall worker compensation.
I hear a lot about the politics of the poor and the rich, but not about how to actually solve these problems we see in our economic system today.
There's something rotten in Denmark.
This is a major component of Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Effectively, medical progress in the U.S. halted roughly in the 1960s and 1970s, with a very small number of exceptions.
If you go back to the bigger picture, virtually all improvements in healthcare outcomes were made prior to 1920, and those largely constituted public health, sanitation, and nutritional improvements. Laurie Garrett attributes 85% of the improvements in lifespan to public health, rather than acute medical treatments.
Improved pre-natal, natal, and childhood circumstances (medical, nutrition, nurturing, nutrition, and safety), overall safety improvements, environmental regulation, and reductions in high-risk behaviours (smoking, drinking, indiscriminate and unprotected sex, injected drugs) have all had major impacts.
Joel Mokyr notes that the truly effective medical advances are tremendously underreported in GDP statistics as the measurement basis is cost rather than benefit.
Sorry, but this turns out to be a tremendous and highly-repeated canard.
We need awareness on where the problem stems from if we want to advocate for effective solution (instead of appealing solutions that won't do much).
(Rents win.)
Are we going to argue then that worker compensation in all the many countries with universal government-paid health insurance is also going through the roof? But my health insurance is identical whether I work or not...
The point is in where to focus the solution. Yes unionizing (or other wage negotiation methods) will help in some areas, but the best economic bang for your buck is fixing incentives in health insurance.
Counterintuitively, slashing the tax cut on employer provided health insurance would be a step forward (especially if combined with other tax measures).