Productivity Gain Allocation and Peak Oil

The Economic Populist has an interesting post on the permanent underclass in the U.S. I highly recommend it. I found this graph and portion of the post interesting:

 The creation of the dependency class can be linked to the oil price shocks of the early 1970s. Up until this point, real personal income followed an upwards trajectory that was in line with productivity, which implies that labor was benefiting from improvements in productivity as much as corporations were. This link was broken around 1975. Productivity continued on an upwards path, but real personal income began to stagnate.
At the time, the productivity improvements were the result largely of the introduction of computers to the work force. Enormous numbers of man-hours spent on simple tasks, such as typing documents, organizing files, tracking sales orders, or managing cash accounts, were freed up for more useful and profitable purposes. As companies began to appreciate the magnitude of the profit opportunities that were opening up, they began to rethink where that profit should go. The long ingrained concept that companies worked to benefit customers, employees, and communities gave way to the idea, pushed aggressively by consultants, that companies should be working first and foremost for the benefit of the shareholders. The cult of the shareholder was born, along with the rather dubious theory that if management concentrated almost exclusively on creating shareholder value (meaning increasing profitability), overall success was assured. Conveniently for management, all this was happening at a time when executive stock options were being invented, which gave management a direct pocketbook interest in boosting the company’s stock price over anything else.
The average worker, who may have received small stock grants but did not participate in the executive stock option program, did not benefit very much from the productivity gains that were feeding into stock market performance and enriching executives. An unprecedented stock market boom, unseen in 200 years of stock trading in the US, began in 1982 and extended until 2000 at an annual growth rate of 16%. The stock market was reflecting the enormous improvements in productivity, enhanced by the “peace dividend” that the US enjoyed in the 1990s when defense spending was reduced as a response to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The stock market boom entered its final spurt upwards in the mid 1990s when the invention of the internet led to a frenzy in technology stocks.
The tech mania came to an end in 2000 with the crash of many of the dot.com stocks. The NASDAQ index, heavy with technology stocks, lost over 50% of its value in one year. White collar workers lost heavily in the market collapse because most had invested passively in the stock market through their 401k plans, which corporations were increasingly offering their workers as alternatives to the traditional pension plan that corporations were abandoning. The dot.com crash added yet another burden to the middle class worker, who was already coping with paltry salary increases and bonuses, plus cutbacks in benefits, that companies were imposing on the work force.

I would attribute the first impact on real personal income to the peak of U.S. oil production in 1971.  The oil embargo grew out of U.S. dependency on imported oil.  Since then, energy costs have been eroding away real personal income.  The productivity gains helped level out some of the impact by offsetting the rising energy costs.  Meanwhile, the folks at the top of the economic pyramid have managed to pocket the majority of the productivity gains.  I think domestic oil production is often overlooked in the timing of the changes in our economy as we transitioned from the  "good old days" until now.