Pay and Production are no longer related for most workers - So Production can be cut, without lowering pay for most workers.

In what year was Reagan elected? I'll give you a tip, it was the same year the country started to get fucked.

You beat me to it. I was just going to reply, “Ronald Regan”.
Forget baby Hitler, if I had a time machine I'd kill baby Reagan.

this is why everyone who's getting screwed on pay should be quiet quitting with no remorse

Been doing that for 3 years and they still haven't fired me. They beg me to join other projects without extra pay so I just decline them every time.
- I was just recently laid off for doing that for several years at my last job. I wasn't "being a team player" and I "do great work, but I could do more" and my "attitude was affecting the team negatively" (read: your enlightening other employees to the fact we are taking advantage of them). Never mind the fact they fired my assistant 3 years ago and never rehired anyone so i was doing two jobs the entire time. Or the fact during my time there i improved a core function of the job by over 20% and saved the company 10s of thousands a year. No, i needed to do more for free. Fuck every employer who operates this way. /rant

"Production can be cut"

Ownership class:

This is why doing the bare minimum in your job is important. They’re doing the bare minimum for you.

Just want to note that the 80s was when the Boomers started taking over/inheriting companies and leadership positions from the generation before them. The Greatest Generation passed the torch to the Worst Generation and things have gotten worse ever since.

This is the part they leave out when you hear, "Boomers had it just as bad."
- But have you considered that I know a Boomer personally, and he isn't rich?

Obligatory EPI Institute webpage on this (recently updated for 2024!)

Production can be cut, without lowering pay for most workers

Companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, so unless you're running a co-op or we transition to a socialist economic structure then this will likely never happen sadly. That huge gap between production and wages is what fuels our current economic paradigm. The system just needs to be rewritten.

So, generated value vs what is compensated. It looks like to me like the difference is the basis for the absurd wealth inequality. So, if we increased wages, let's say roughly 2x for the mean, 5x for the bottom 10p, and 1.5x for 90p, and 0.5x up to 95p. Has anyone done a calculation similar to this, to determine just how few people, that is, how high the percentile, and how low that factor, for that to actually add up? Maybe it even allows for everyone to live decent lives, just mildly inconveniencing a few thousand?

One can start wondering if a few hundred heads rolling isn't a valid moral least-evil proposition. Life considered equal. More people die every single day due to arguably greed. In most of the 99.9p+ cases, I assume is due to inherited wealth, and existing market capture. So it's not like some exceptional value is lost to humanity either.

Note this is before the pandemic, and now there are way more 200+ billion dlls billionairs

Switzerland is one of the few countries where this graph hasn’t strayed. I wonder if it is because how strong apprenticeship and manual jobs are valued in our culture?

Germany has a pretty similar apprenticeship system to Switzerland, but a massive gap.
- Maybe the salary increases of the boses of the companies registered in our tax haven cantons are artificially closing the gap.

Does anyone know what happened in the early 1960's that led to that smaller, but still noticeable diversion?

Unfortunately I don't know.
To correlate the effect with social processes, one would have to plot the same graph for multiple countries and see what processes occur in each history at the time of the lines forking apart (assuming they do so).
Some guesses: automation, perhaps globalization of supply chains, something related to the effectiveness of employees at bargaining with employers?
MBAs took over businesses from internal promotions.