Company is sticking with figure it gave in 2012 but stresses it’s “over” that amount. How much over, Google’s not saying.
Google confirmed to Search Engine Land that it did give Backchannel the 2012 figure — over 100 billion per month, which Google rounds to 3 billion per day — for its story. Google told us that the figure still holds for today since “over” leaves things open-ended (and by implication, higher). Google also said not to expect an updated figure any time soon.
The False Promise of Last Year’s Wage Gains
According to EPI, if wages had kept pace with productivity growth over 30 or so years, a worker making $50,000 today would instead be earning about $75,000. Instead, the gains from productivity have been channeled elsewhere, often to executives and shareholders.
In 2015, things seemed like they might be getting back on track. Nominal wages (that is, wage growth not adjusted for inflation) increased by 1.8 percent on the year. But according to the report, 2015’s uptick was caused by a decrease in inflation rather than an improvement in actual wages, and when looking at real wages (adjusted for inflation) and factoring in core inflation, which specifically removes more volatile portions of the inflation measure—wage growth was zero.
Two-Percent Growth Is a Loser for the Angry Middle Class
Real middle-class wages are still flat-lining. These folks get nothing out of 2 percent growth.
.. Research has shown that middle-income wage earners would benefit most from a large reduction in corporate tax rates. The corporate tax is not a rich-man’s tax. Corporations don’t even pay it. They just pass the tax on in terms of lower wages and benefits, higher consumer prices, and less stockholder value.
.. Slash the corporate tax rate to 15 percent for large C-corps and small S-corps, go to immediate tax deductions for new investment, and make it easy for firms to repatriate their overseas earnings.
.. This would be the single-most stimulative program for reigniting economic growth. Principally, it’s a middle-class tax cut. If you combine that with regulatory rollbacks and a stable dollar, within less than a year the U.S. economy can break out of its doldrums.
Are We Doomed to Slow Growth?
A key question in economics today is: Does technological advancement, and the improvement in average people’s material conditions that it creates, continue upward at a steady rate? Or has it already peaked?
.. Economies that are stagnant lead to conflict; if the pie isn’t getting bigger, after all, the only way to improve your lot is to grab someone else’s slice. It’s telling to look at the current presidential campaign through this lens. Bernie Sanders is arguing that this stagnant-pie-stealing has been going on for some time, while Donald Trump says that he can keep outsiders away from our desserts altogether.
.. Gordon concludes that despite all the upheaval of the past 200 years, there have really been only a handful of fundamental steps forward: electricity, the telephone, the combustion engine, mass production, indoor plumbing, the conquest of infectious diseases and the computer. He argues that everything else, including the Internet and the smartphone, is simply a variation on these themes — and that for all our 21st-century talk of ‘‘innovation,’’ the pace of real transformative innovation has radically slowed during the past half-century.
.. There was an enormous upward shift in productivity between 1920 and 1970, a rate of growth unseen at any other time in human history. But after 1970, that growth slowed. Then there was another, lesser blip upward during the years surrounding 2000, as computers went mainstream and became married to communication, in the form of the Internet. If we exclude that blip, though, the past 50 years have seen roughly half the rate of productivity growth as the 50 that preceded them. Gordon argues that this relatively slow growth in productivity, together with rising inequality, helps explain not just the stagnation in American wages but the general feeling of anger and despair.
.. In the last century, the main way a person’s productivity rose was by going to work at a large company and doing what the boss said. Today, lots of people are finding ways to improve their own lot — and overall productivity — on their own.
.. The language of the current presidential campaign — when it’s coherent at all — is of taxes and regulation, immigration and carpet-bombing. It is the language of zero-sum stagnancy, not expansive, shared growth.