Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix If you listen carefully, you can hear Jeff Bezos getting richer. There’s the sound again. Another billion in Bezos’ coffers. Let’s put some numbers to this sound of money. Since 2017, Bezos’ net worth has grown by about $4 million per hour — roughly 500,000 […]
Continue ReadingProductivity and Income … Again
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Today I’m going to revisit a topic that a month ago I committed to stop writing about — the productivity-income quagmire. Neoclassical economists argue that income is proportional to productivity. The problem is that they have no way of measuring productivity that is independent of […]
Continue ReadingDebunking the ‘Productivity-Pay Gap’
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Have you heard of the ‘productivity-pay gap’? It’s the (apparently) growing gap between the productivity of US workers and their pay. Here’s what it looks like: In this post, I debunk the ‘productivity-pay gap’ by showing that it has nothing to do with productivity. The […]
Continue ReadingProductivity Does Not Explain Wages
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Does productivity explain income? I asked this question in a previous post. My answer was a bombastic no. In this post, I’ll dig deeper into the reasons that productivity doesn’t explain income. I’ll focus on wages. The evidence Let’s start with the evidence trumpeted as […]
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