I know what they want to say, but I think their argument is quite weak, because essentially you have US industries that aren't tech. American workers still get higher salaries than elsewhere in the OECD and growth in such industries isn't out competing those same industries in other OECD countries. In fact many industries are lagging behind. So actually US workers are being paid more not less than elsewhere.

Then you have tech. In tech, US workers are again paid more than in other OECD countries. But growth in tech is just insane and it makes a huge percentage of the GDP growth. And there aren't a whole lot of tech workers as a percentage of the total workforce. So although tech workers are paid a whole lot more than in other OECD countries, they aren't capturing as much of the growth of the tech industry.

So really this is an argument that tech workers in the US should be paid even more, and I don't think that sells so well as the populist argument that the authors intended to make.

And to me saying, that an autoworker that works for Ford, is not capturing the GDP growth that is generated by Google, is nonsensical.

> American workers still get higher salaries than elsewhere in the OECD and growth in such industries isn't out competing those same industries in other OECD countries.

I used to think that also, probably because FAANG salaries had skewed my perception, but after looking at the data, this does not seem to be actually true, at least not in general.

For example, Germany has a somewhat higher annual median gross salary for full-time employees than the US (PPP-adjusted, BLS/DESTATIS salary data, OECD PPP values).

Of course, this is the median salary. America absolutely offers higher salaries at the top end (and I mean much higher, often by a factor of 2-3 for highly qualified professionals, such as software engineers and doctors). But that also means correspondingly lower salaries at the low end. And of course, labor is taxed heavily in Germany, so discretionary/disposable income may look different in the end on a case-by-case basis.