Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials Highlight

In fact, nonsupervisory workers’ productivity increased rapidly between 1972 and 2009, while real wages dipped.8 Until the 1970s, both metrics grew together; their disjuncture is perhaps the single phenomenon that defines Millennials thus far. Since young workers represent both a jump in productivity and a decrease in labor costs, this means we’re generating novel levels of “surplus value”—productivity beyond what workers receive in compensation.