CONCEPT
The Great Decoupling
Brynjolfsson and McAfee's term for the divergence, beginning in the late 1970s, between American productivity growth (rising) and median wage growth (stagnant) — a break in the postwar pattern that technology, institutions, and distributional choices jointly produced.
The Great Decoupling describes the historical break, documented rigorously by Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in The Second Machine Age (2014), between productivity and median compensation in the American economy. For roughly three decades after World War II, these two curves moved together — when the economy became more productive, median workers saw their wages rise proportionally. Beginning in the late 1970s, the curves diverged. Between 1973 and 2016, American productivity roughly doubled. Median household income, adjusted for inflation, grew by only about twenty percent. The gap represented enormous economic value generated by the economy's expanding capacity but not reaching the median worker — flowing instead upward to executives, capital owners, and the technologically elite. The AI transition, if its gains distributed along the same lines as previous digital technology gains, threatened to accelerate the divergence to a point that threatened social cohesion.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The decoupling was not caused solely