"Next to This Stupendous Transformation, All the Culture Wars and Flag-Fights and Stupid Tweets Fade into Insignificance"

"According to Josh Bivens, of Washington's Economic Policy Institute, you can trace the slow decline of US workers' bargaining power in the historical statistics. As the years go by, it requires ever lower levels of unemployment to ignite the wage growth that was once the hallmark of good times. 'The decades-long campaign by employers to kick away any sources of economic leverage enjoyed by typical workers seems to have worked,' he tells me. 'These workers now get real wage increases only during white-hot labour markets.'
"This is the central story of the last four decades, the vast social engineering project to which all our recent presidents and both parties have contributed."

Thomas Frank at The Guardian writes that the American economy's problem is "not the possibility that workers might prosper, but that they're not prospering yet."