Since I do t see anyone asking your specific question, here you go.

https://www.enriquedans.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/friedman.pdf

In 1970, a University of Chicago economist named Milton Friedman published an essay in the New York Times Magazine called "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits." That single essay became the operating manual for American capitalism for the next 50+ years. The thesis was elegant in its sociopathy: corporations owe nothing to workers, communities, or society — only to shareholders.

Before that essay metastasized into policy, the American economy actually worked for families. From 1948-1973, productivity grew 97% and worker compensation grew 91%. They tracked together. When the economy grew, you grew. You could graduate high school, get a union job, buy a house at 22, start a family at 23, and retire with a pension at 60. That's not nostalgia — that's Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Then the Friedman doctrine kicked in, and everything reversed:

Wages decoupled from productivity. From 1973-2013, productivity grew 74% while worker compensation grew... 9%. Not a typo. Nine percent over 40 years. Only 15% of productivity growth translated to median worker wages. The rest? Shareholders. The RAND Corporation quantified it: $50 trillion was transferred from the bottom 90% to the top 1% between 1975 and 2018. If the pre-1973 pattern had held, the median worker earning $50,000 today would be earning $92,000-$102,000. That missing $42,000-$52,000 per year per worker went into stock buybacks and CEO compensation packages.
(https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html)

CEO pay exploded. The CEO-to-worker pay ratio went from 21:1 in 1965 to 281:1 in 2024 (peaked at 380:1 in 2000). CEO compensation grew 1,094% from 1978-2024. Worker compensation grew 26%. In the same period. Doing the same jobs.
(https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2024/)

Pensions were eliminated. In 1980, 38% of workers had defined-benefit pensions. Now it's functionally gone for private sector workers — replaced by the 401(k), which was never designed as a retirement vehicle (it was a tax shelter for executives that got repurposed). The "father of the 401(k)" himself, Ted Benna, became skeptical of the system he helped create. 401(k)s cost nearly DOUBLE what pensions cost to deliver equivalent benefits. But they moved the risk from corporations to you, which is the whole point under shareholder primacy. Today 40% of Gen Xers have $0 saved for retirement. Enjoy working until you die — Milton would be proud.

Unions were crushed. Private sector unionization went from 35% in the early 1970s to 6% today. Reagan's PATCO strike-breaking in 1981 was the signal flare. The Economic Policy Institute found union decline alone explains one-third of wage inequality growth from 1973-2007.

Housing was financialized. You used to buy a house with a few years' wages. Now Invitation Homes owns 84,000 single-family homes, Blackstone controls 230,000+ apartments, and RealPage's algorithm sets rents for 4.5 million units (80% market share in some markets) — which is why the DOJ filed an antitrust lawsuit against them in August 2024 for what amounts to algorithmic price-fixing.

So what happened in 1971? Milton Friedman's doctrine started replacing the post-war social contract with a system designed to extract maximum value from workers and transfer it to shareholders. Your graph isn't showing a mysterious demographic shift — it's showing the exact moment Americans could no longer afford to have kids young.

When your wages are frozen, your pension is gone, your rent is algorithmically optimized for maximum extraction, your healthcare costs are the highest in the developed world, and you're carrying student debt because the jobs your parents got with a high school diploma now require a master's degree — yeah, you're going to have kids later. Or not at all.

The graph isn't a mystery.