The Importance of Real Wages and Relative Wages

Peter Turchin has a useful distinction in his book, Ages of Discord between real wages and relative wages. If workers are getting ahead, you would expect their income to be constant or growing portion of total output. But the reality over the last 30 years is that GDP has grown much faster than workers' share of GDP. It's also been the case that growth has been slow, which means workers' real wages have actually been unusually stagnant.