In the end all the material progress our civilization has experienced since the Industrial Revolution has been due to increased productivity. Wages for workers can never go higher than worker productivity without the business employing them going out of business. Historically workers have received half of the returns to productive capital and that doesn't seem to be changing. However, recently the return to rents on land have gone up drastically and so capital's overall share of national income has gone up. But that's not a problem that can be solved by making workers less productive.
Wages for workers can increase faster than productivity if the business has a large fraction of fixed or non-labor costs.
Also, hasn't the productivity->wage ratio decreased in the past few decades? I've seen charts that seem to indicate that, but I suppose the timeframe could be cherry-picked or otherwise misleading.
> hasn't the productivity->wage ratio decreased in the past few decades?
We have been in a productivity crisis in the past few decades. AFAIK, nobody knows if it's because we are measuring everything wrong, because people are reluctant to adopt more productive habits, or because modern engineering completely failed on that front. But whatever is the cause, expect to see lots of noise and complex behavior on anything that touches productivity.
