The fact is capital expenditure from company or investors has bought machinery, compute, pipelines, transport, and massive investment to make those workers more productive for decades. As such, the returns to capital as a share has increased. Those places able to deploy capital to add productivity win over those that don’t.
And real total remuneration across all quintiles has increased significantly. BLS among others has all historical data to check.
If/when there’s a period where there isn’t more gains to be had by more investment per worker, and workers become more productive via their own skill (education, diet, genetic implants,…), then more returns will flow that direction.
This is all well known, and easily checked.
That's both true and false. Yes they need very few people to operate, but building and maintaining still need a lot of people.
This is correct, and it has an impact on local employment and social dynamics, but not at the country level.
> They need fewer people to build and to maintain than older ones did.
That's absolutely not true. Quite the opposite. You do need less people to build and maintain a modern plant than to operate an factory in the past.
Also, you need to clarify what you mean by “older”, because heavy industries have automated steadily between the 50s and the 80s, and that process was mostly achieved by the 90s.
And I can't think of an industry that was still labor intensive by the 20s and that has been more impacted by automation than offshoring.
if you formed a co-op of sorts, with let's say 20 people, starting with no land ownership and hardly any tools, they could try to make a business. Whatever they end up starting would be a fairly low-productivity business- washing windows, janitorial services, lawn service, etc. The more tools and land a co-op has to work with, the more productive they can be. With a few million dollars up-front they could have built a factory instead.
The increased productivity generated can be attributed to the capital share of income.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/jun/worker-sc...
Outsourcing and automation both reduce worker leverage, which reduces wages, which could explain reduced labor share. I'm not sure how one would weight it all.