Effectively when I was a kid and a young adult a full shopping cart of groceries took a significantly smaller percentage of my parents and then my paycheck.
I'm old enough to remember when a high school graduate could make a payment on a car and a house and afford to have kids, without significant credit card debt.
And is that money printing or technology automating away the need for people to exist in the corporate world? Why would slow, steady, and predictable levels of theft lead to permanently lower wages?
It is far more likely that the value of a person to the economy is quite simply less.
That's probably oversimplified too, call up a plumber or a carpenter and get back to me with the quote.
I'll expand on this tomorrow. I actually went to the grocery store today and logged the prices for a variety of items - I'm considering calling it the "Cap'N Crunch Index".
Plumbers and carpenters are not the the jobs being displaced right now.
Everyone needs a job.
So what happens when 10% of the population lose their job and there are none left to fill?
We see what happens first hand: people with 10 years experience in management being told they are underqualified to work at a giftshop. Or even worse told they are "overqualified" and the job just goes to Susan's 18 year old college kid.
What do you think happens to the economy when every single truck driver in the country suddenly finds themselves out of a job due to self-driving cars and AI? Yeah, the plumbers will be just fine. Not the point. You've ironically used an oversimplification to accuse me of oversimplification. Such is the complexity of this issue.