Meanwhile household basics increased faster than wages. In other words people don’t have more money.

https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index

> the average number of hours worked per worker have fallen

Hooray for just-in-time scheduling where workers have to be available full time but rarely get scheduled full time. It’s an innovation that has been great for capital and terrible for labor.

Upvote for bringing data, since I did not. That said, that quote was in reference to AI, so referred to the past 3-4 years. And of course, our money today is not worth as much as it was 20+ years ago. Also many important goods and services increased in price at a higher rate than inflation or wage increases. It might be interesting to look at such industries for a history of consolidation or PE-involvement.

I don't find either of these charts dispositive by themselves. The cost of healthcare, education, housing, transportation, and insurance have easily outpaced any growth in wages. Another facet of this debate is that cheaper goods aren't necessarily of equal or better quality.

> Of course they do.

That level of certainty is not justified.

25% increase in half a century? We ahd like 3 technological revolutions since then and economy grew massively.

Compare that to how much wealth appreciated, like a price of gold or real estate.

Median real wages increased by the narrowest possible meaning of this word.

Trickle down economy is literally a trickle.

Nicely sliced. Weekly wages for full time workers have been rising for decades while fewer workers work full time. I don't think this data backs your assertion.

I live in Atlanta ("y'allywood"), a formerly big LA film outsourcing location. They shot much of Marvel and Netflix stuff here pre-2023. The unit below me has been rented to Winona Ryder and Dave Bautista.

Beyond that, my hobby is film and I know tons of people in the industry. I've made indie films with them.

All the jobs have gone to Europe. It's simply cheaper to film there now. Amazon and Netflix built infrastructure and taught local crews how during the pandemic content wars.

Looking at my Gen Z wife, all the eyeballs have gone to TikTok.

There's the answer.

Economists keep saying over and over that so far AI has had minimal impact on the economy. That may change in time, but we aren’t seeing massive losses as a result of AI, despite some C suites using that as an excuse to lay off after over hiring.

https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/what-re...

Maybe a lot of people worked at stackoverflow idk; but I have been organising electronic “underground” music nights for 15+ years and basically stopped now because there just wasn’t a big enough audience anymore.

Anyway what I’m trying to say is that I think COVID and its aftermath is a much bigger factor here than AI, especially when it comes to “live / performing” art

Yes, it definitely can. That's sort of why I kept putting it in scarequotes. I am not skeptic of AI, fwiw. Mostly just our current crop of corpo/gov leadership and their views on what healthy economy looks like.