Technology Change Not the Culprit in Wages Falling Behind US Productivity Gains
This touches on something I&#x27;ve been thinking about but don&#x27;t have a word to look into further; maybe someone can help me out.<p>I would think that the productivity of a worker (as defined here) would put an <i>upper bound</i> on wages, but not that wages would necessarily rise to that. That would depend on supply and demand of labor.<p>The concept I&#x27;ve been toying with is this: suppose there are 100 software jobs and 90 software developers. In that regime, the wages will rise to the value created by the software developers, since there will be a bidding war among the companies that need them, and they&#x27;ll be willing to pay up to what the developer is worth to them. On the other hand, suppose there are 100 software jobs and 110 software developers. Now the wages will <i>fall</i> to the minimum amount the developers will take, based on cost of living or switching careers or whatever, since companies will now offer as little as they can get away with.<p>IOW, I think that there are two discontinuous &quot;wage regimes&quot; depending on if there are more workers than jobs, or more jobs than workers. Is there a term or concept for this that I can read about more?