Michael R. Strain, Columnist

Wages Are Based More on Productivity, Less on Exploitation

Capitalism isn’t broken. This is how it’s supposed to work.

December 31, 2019 at 2:00 PM UTC

Michael R. Strain is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is director of economic policy studies and Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).”

Ranking high on the productivity scale, like it or not.
Photographer: Michael Short/Bloomberg

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“Workers are delivering more, and they’re getting a lot less,” argued former Vice President Joe Biden in a speech at the Brookings Institution this summer. “There’s no correlation now between productivity and wages.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic presidential rival, agrees. Her campaign website states that “wages have largely stagnated,” even though “worker productivity has risen steadily.”