"This Is Not How the Economy Is Supposed to Work"

"Pay is supposed to increase during periods of low unemployment, because workers have more power to demand raises from their current employer, or else leave for a better-paying job, while employers have to pay more to retain employees and to compete for new ones. That's what happened during the jobs boom of the late 1990s, when wages jumped as high as 5 percent annually.
"But that hasn't happened to a meaningful degree today, defying expectations and confounding economists. It's intuitive that employers don't like increasing wages, because that leaves fewer profits for them. But economic dynamics like low unemployment are supposed to force their hand. So why have workers not seen the benefits in their paychecks from one of the longest periods of economic and employment growth in history?"

David Dayen at The New Republic argues that "[c]apitalism, as it's practiced in the United States, has broken economics."