If you divide today's GDP by the number of people employed, and adjust for inflation, you'll find that average worker productivity went up 4x since the 1950s, while wages stayed stagnant or went down.
This is a good thing. Overpopulation is behind some of the biggest dangers that face the entire human race, including climate change, overfishing, ecosystem collapse (bees and others disappearing due to stresses introduced by changes in agriculture), factory farms (ethical issues) etc.
Countries have to break their dependence on the old style pyramid of more young people paying for old people's social security. It encourages exponential population growth, which just leads people into trouble later on and kicks the can down the road.
These studies are flawed as they use "median household income" but households have changed a lot since the 1950s. There's many many more single parent households than in the 1950s. If you compare individual wages instead of households you can better see the wage increase since the 1950s.
Also a cell phone cost $7000000 in 1950. So if we look at the change in terms of cell phones rather than in terms of pieces of paper with pictures of dead white guys on them, wages have gone up over a million time while productivity has only gone up 4X. (well, not really, but to make a point...).
In the 1950's families generally had one car. They didn't eat out as much. Less vacations. More work to manage a household. So amount of paper in hand is maybe less of an indicator than amount of goods and services that paper can buy. Which has increased I think.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speedup-american...
Companies aren't hiring like they used to. There is no need. Automation and outsourcing have reduced the demand for local labor.
http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=185
This is a good thing. Overpopulation is behind some of the biggest dangers that face the entire human race, including climate change, overfishing, ecosystem collapse (bees and others disappearing due to stresses introduced by changes in agriculture), factory farms (ethical issues) etc.
Countries have to break their dependence on the old style pyramid of more young people paying for old people's social security. It encourages exponential population growth, which just leads people into trouble later on and kicks the can down the road.