Henry Blodget, the editor of Business Insider, rounded up a monster chart slideshow under the headline "Here's What the Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About..." It's a pretty brilliant production. But his conclusion -- that wages' falling share of GDP explains the Occupy Wall Street movement -- is missing some important context.

Blodget walks readers through the last 30 years in income inequality, from the rise in bank profits to the unemployment bomb. He calls his class slide "the one overarching reason the Wall Street protesters are so upset" The big reveal: Wages as a percent of the economy [are] basically the lowest ever."



Here is that graph.



This is an important, but misleading graph. Here's what this picture tells you: Wages (think: paychecks) have fallen from 51 percent of the economy to 44 percent of the economy in the last 50 years. That sounds like total salaries have cratered.



But here's what this graph leaves out: Compensation as a share of the economy hasn't changed more than a percentage point since 1960.



This sounds like a paradox. It's not. There's a big difference between compensation and wages. Compensation is what the boss pays to have you work. It includes your health care, pension benefits, and employer contributions to Social Security, Medicare and other government programs. As it turns out, all those things have increased from about 4.5 percent of the economy in 1960 to about 11 percent of the economy is 2009. As a result, they have eaten into wages.*

