Including rental and self-income data shows inequality hasn’t changed in nine decades.
Atkinson ‘21 [Robert; 3/10/21; Founder and President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina; "How Progressives Have Spun Dubious Theories and Faulty Research Into a Harmful New Antitrust Doctrine," https://itif.org/publications/2021/03/10/how-progressives-have-spun-dubious-theories-and-faulty-research-harmful-new]
Myth 7: Market Concentration Has Caused Labor’s Share of Income to Fall26
Neo-Brandeisians have argued that increased market concentration has reduced the share of national income going to labor. The idea is that as companies gain more market power, they take an increased share of economic output, with workers getting less.
But according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, virtually none of labor’s lost share of income goes to increased profits, as a theory of market power might predict. Rather, the gains are almost totally from increases in both rental income—imputed rent (the value an owner would get from renting the home they occupy at market rates) homeowners receive and actual rent renters pay—and to some extent the mismeasurement of self-employment income. And when looking at the change in combined worker, rental, and self-employment income as a share of net national income, versus combined profits and net interest income, the former ratio is essentially unchanged over the last 90 years. (See figure 4.) In other words, the declining share of labor income has almost nothing do with monopoly power.