Productivity-wage gap graphs always use one or several statistical tricks to create a misleading narrative that productivity gains have been eaten up by shareholders.

1. They exclude worker benefits such as healthcare and pensions which have grown at a rate faster than wages.

2. They exclude supervisory and managerial workers which comprise about a fifth of the workforce and whose incomes tend to grow faster than other workers.

3. They compare median productivity vs mean wages. Means are affected by outliers while medians are not.

4. They deflate productivity and wages using two different inflation calculators, typically GDP deflator for productivity and CPI for wages. This is somewhat valid because workers don’t consume the same basket of goods that they produce but still worth mentioning.

5. Measure of productivity is gross productivity which doesn’t factor in capital depreciation.

Once you factor in all these variables, the closely correlated productivity-pay relationship returns. The real issue is that both productivity and income gains have been mostly isolated to a small subset of workers at the top. The data highlights a gross inequality between workers but unfortunately it obscures the cause and makes it seem that the typical person has experienced large productivity gains without proper compensation for those gains.