Wage Stagnation
The problem with this entire discussion is that we use terms like &quot;wages&quot; and &quot;productivity&quot;, which have meanings in the English language, and associate them with metrics which are utterly divorced from those meanings.  To have a sane discussion, we&#x27;re forced to use these shorthands, but the fact of the matter is that if we spelled out what we were actually measuring it would be very clear that all of these phenomena being measured refer to things disconnected from any of our actual experience.<p>Even more so, the methodology for most of this data has changed so much over time, with so little overlap between methodologies, that we have literally no idea what the state of the world was even a few years ago.  All we have are a mixture of giant measurement artifacts, and when two of them correlate we celebrate because we might have found a metric that can bridge the divide between methodologies, but that correspondence disappears as soon as we try to find out if there are systemic changes -- our ability to determine whether something has changed has an implicit reliance on the assumption that nothing has changed, so all of these arguments become circular.<p>Econometrics is a philosophical dead end that just ends up producing broken policies disconnected from reality and causing us to make up a new suite of politically-motivated metrics to match the outcomes that we&#x27;re looking for, and then give the metrics names that refer to things that have intuitive meanings and pretend we&#x27;ve found insight.<p>You really have to go back to non-econometric-based economics (the Austrians, von Mises and Hayek) to get any sort of insight into how economies can be made to work at scale, and the answer is that we don&#x27;t understand them, and that technological progress and population changes mean that attempts to push them in a direction will have side effects that far outweigh any of the attempted influence.