Wealth & Money Quote by David Korten

Korten’s line is built like a calm spreadsheet note, but it’s really an accusation. “If you look” is an invitation that doubles as a challenge: the facts are there, hiding in plain sight, and anyone not seeing them is choosing not to. The timeframe, “15-20 years,” is strategic too. It’s long enough to indict a system, not a single president or business cycle, and it steers the conversation away from headline GDP growth toward the lived experience of paychecks that don’t stretch.

The subtext is a rejection of the official story Americans are routinely sold: that a growing economy automatically lifts workers. By centering wages, he’s implying the economy has been optimized for something else - investor returns, executive compensation, asset prices - while the supposed engine of prosperity (labor) is treated as a cost to be contained. “Stagnating or even declining” widens the net: not just people falling behind because prices rise, but people literally earning less in real terms, a quieter kind of crisis that doesn’t trigger emergency politics.

Context matters: this is the post-globalization, post-financialization era, where productivity can climb while bargaining power erodes. It also echoes a cultural mood: resentment at being told to celebrate record markets while rent and healthcare chew up raises that never arrive. Korten isn’t merely describing data; he’s laying groundwork for moral and policy claims - that the economy’s scorecard is rigged, and that “success” has been redefined to exclude the people doing the work.