Consume Product

My perception is that wages have stagnated due to active suppression methods in the USA as the boomer generation had higher wages as adjusted for inflation, while productivity gains have been made via technological developments so there should be more money available to pay workers higher wages

So my question is about how to raise wages?

Frequently I'm seeing people on the right (maybe mostly older people?) argue for regular workers to be paid less in wages you can't live independently on, while I sometimes hear stories of older people who were able to raise families on simple jobs

My understanding is that a lot of the extra profits have gone to shareholders and CEOs, that could have gone to workers, to keep wage rates up

A couple thought experiments come to mind to visualize this, like thinking about a small business owner who pockets all the profits from his business, versus an employee at a similar business who is paid a wage at a much smaller rate - while there is more risk that that owner takes than the employee, the "mere" ownership of the business yields a higher pay rate. (Some corporations that take loans on money printed out of thin air that they can get bailed out on by the public if they go bust, do not even take the "ownership risk" that many identify as the justification for lower wages for workers and higher rates paid out to CEOs / shareholders)

So, I guess one answer to how to increase "wages" is for people to be business owners

A second answer is to encourage more people to become the shareholders who are getting lots of the profits from these businesses, I guess

Could more money simply be paid out to workers from the monies that are going to CEOs / shareholders?

A second visualization experiment is that of American factory workers being paid good living wages, and of these jobs being "outsourced" to some other country at lower wage rates; the profits again from this move, must be going to shareholders and CEOs of the company, whereas before they were going to American workers

So the idea that the "hands are tied" of businesses and they must pay below "living wages" isn't really a set in stone argument, as seemingly in the above manufacturing job example they could have just "paid more" to keep the jobs with American workers

Another problem with some of this discussion is a back and forth appeal to some "objective" wage rate, versus the subjective theory of value in capitalism; in other words, frequently wages and prices are set just arbitrarily based on what people want. Ergo, it's equally as "rational" in a "free market" to argue that workers ought to minimally be paid $30/hour as it is to argue that they should be paid $5/hour - just like you could argue CEOs should only be paid maybe 10x that of the average worker versus 300x (which is where it is about at in 2026).

I suppose the other part of this discussion is that "wages" don't necessarily need to increase, so much as we need effective secondary investment schemes so that people can grow even small wages into larger sums of money to pay for their needs. It's possible for people to make investments that see returns much beyond wage rates they can work for. However, I don't see why we couldn't do both: increase wages as well as leverage investments.

So anyway, I was curious about what could be done to raise wages in society or if you think this is a desirable goal or if some secondary or other goal might be focused on to generate wealth and prosperity generally in society

edit: a quick AI discussion led to a conclusion of two main drivers of wage increases:

1) productivity gains. This directly increases the monies or value available to distribute.

2) ownership of capital. This gives you the ultimate claim - in part or totally - to the productivity gains produced.

Maybe a lot of the rest of the discussion is edge cases around these