easy to blame this, but all productivity gains in the US for 40 years have gone to the top; the reason is that our labor market has been undercut by immigration (legitimate and illegitimate) and globalized supply chains. workers do not have the ability to extract higher wages because of a concerted international project to make the labor market as liquid as possible and arbitrage populations with lower standards of living against them. this has been a huge boon to the owners and financiers of industry (and parts of the developing world) at the expense of normal americans. this is the trade our masters have made on our behalf, beginning as a solution to the economic crisis of the 1970s, and as a dead woman once said, "there is no alternative".