How else are those meager board of executives, who don't produce anything of actual value, going to ever afford their yachts and mansions if not for skimming more and more off the top?? /s
It'd be great if that weren't true, that the people who actually make the money hardly get to see any of it while those at the top rake it all in for themselves.
By what scale? Medieval peasants only had to pay 10% in taxes and got sooooo much free time. Technology even today is still bad for us, but nature and free time? Come on, what's the point of having all these gadgets and what not if we don't have the time to use them, and they're all run by faceless corporations who make things as addictive and monetized as possible?
Productivity. That's what you want to compare to wages, and it has definitely increased faster than wages, so why aren't the workers being paid proportionately to their increased productivity?
Medieval peasants only had to pay 10% in taxes and got sooooo much free time.
They also had no access to information or medicine, no human rights, no nutrition, no healthcare of any kind, and only expected to live to the age of 50 if they were lucky. Also "10% taxes" is laughable considering under serfdom peasants were basically considered the property of the landed nobles.
I agree with the premise that late stage capitalism is a cancer, but I do have to say this particular scale of productivity/wage doesn't necessarily imply effort/wage directly. Tooling and technology has also improved productivity and in some cases has made jobs far less effort than they once were; arguably a good portion of profits were paid to who developed those solutions.
I don't have a better comparison to offer unfortunately, just a small blind spot in the data I think is worth mentioning.