link

Haven't read through the whole thing, but I thought this nugget was interesting:

The Importance of Productivity, Inequality, and Participation

As productivity, the income distribution, and participation evolved over the past 65 years, middle‑class incomes went from doubling once in a generation to showing almost no growth at all by some measures. But if these three factors had recently continued the strong trends observed in earlier periods, the outcome for typical families would be quite different. Four counterfactual thought experiments give a sense of the magnitudes involved in this dramatic change:

The impact of higher productivity growth:

What if productivity growth from 1973 to 2013 had continued at its pace from the previous 25 years? In this scenario, incomes would have been 58 percent higher in 2013. If these gains were distributed proportionately in 2013, then the median household would have had an additional $30,000 in income.

The impact of greater income equality:

What if inequality had not increased from 1973 to 2013, and instead the share of income going to the bottom 90 percent had remained the same? Even using the actual slow levels of productivity growth over that period, the 2013 income for the typical household would have been 18 percent, or about $9,000, higher