> Automation, robots, software etc. they are all capital share.

I highly doubt automation and robots are a meaningful factor here, but IP and outsourcing have the exact same as automation.

Employee compensation comes from capital. And employees are working at companies that provide robots, etc.

There's a return on capital than is not spent on employees. That reflects how much capital is growing and how much can be spent on employees in the future.

This is a good point I haven't considered in the past and worth to take into the overall discussion.

Salaries aren't about what someone "deserves" or "should earn".

Those in control will try to capture as much of the return as possible. How much value the worker captures is based on their relative power (ability to move to a higher paying employer, scarcity of skillset, laws such as minimum wage, etc).

> Should I capture the increased output

You do capture the increased output by benefiting from a society where the cost to build safe buildings has drastically reduced.

Just because you don't get an immediate financial benefit doesn't mean you haven't benefitted from the increased output.

> Or should the innovators, firms, and customers all get less, and instead my wages should get bigger?

In almost all of the cases the "innovators" are themselves workers whose share of the outcome has been dropping. And the "customers" have never gotten a piece of the profits; we are already past the point where reduced prices would have happened (competition) in this system.

And I think that by "firms" you really mean some combination of executives and investors/shareholders. That is where the gains have been centralized. Do you really want to argue that management and investors deserve to have more of the gains? What have they done that makes them so much more valuable than similar groups in bygone days?

Productivity is just aggregate output of the economy divided by the number of people-hours worked. You can argue about if that's a useful thing to measure or if the measurements themselves are accurate or if you should capture more of the output, but at root it's very simplistic. If you can use AutoCAD to generate more drawings than using paper which you (or your firm) sells for the same price per drawing, then your productivity did go up. Is that meaningful? Less certain.

In practice what happens is that on average the tool-user's wages go up slightly but most of the jobs in the field are eliminated, and the resulting large profit mostly goes to managers and financiers.

And many laborers have retirement accounts and pension funds that are also capital owners, so they benefit from increases in capital too.

Thats a good list of questions here’s another good thought provoking line of thinking:

As someone trading labour for a wage should I adjust my productivity to match the tools I’m using? That is to say if I’m using CAD should I bother using the tool to raise my productivity? Or should I just match my old hand drafting productivity rates? Should I attempt to raise my productivity rates with these new tools to meet or exceed the best rates from my coworkers?

What can we do to align my interests with those of my employer?

r>0 is not the problem, r>g is the problem, and that one's a lot less morally ambiguous.

yes, but wage growth has not tracked productivity: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1X020

household expenses have been increasing without commensurate wage growth, resulting in lower savings: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT

2% is average. 1-1.5% is considered a slump, while anything over 2.5% is considered a boom. for instance, the post-ww2 boom (1947-1972) averaged 2.9%. at that rate of growth, a country's total output per worker doubles in roughly ~25 years.

Is this inflation adjusted?

Construction notably has had productivity losses since the 80s afaik.

I own a Medicaid home care agency in 13 states. We serve low income families and our caregivers, who earn $12-18hr which is higher than minimum wage, absolutely struggle. We have created food banks and housing assistance because even working people are a few sick days or one car repair away from homelessness.

I would encourage you to go work with average Americans in average towns. The facts on the ground are stark and eroding.

I think “abject poverty” is probably overstating the case a bit. I do think quality of life is trending downward given the fact that housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing while wages are stagnant or worse.

> Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend.

There is a pretty clear down-trend post-COVID here.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...

If you have negative net worth and the bank's money, not yours, is buying your food and housing, you are in abject poverty, just that the system is propping up your survival for a while.

A lot of the US looks like they're doing great but fits into the category above.

Non-poverty would look like:

* You make enough money to pay for your own food, housing, and transportation in full, with enough buffer for emergencies, without needing to borrow a cent

* You make enough money to be on trajectory to save up to pay for your own food, housing, transportation, and medical expenses in retirement when you are physically unable to serve the workforce

Mississippi, the poorest state, has similar median income to Germany. I’m pretty sure 50% of the people there are not in abject poverty.

The homeless number under estimates people with unstable housing that aren’t on the streets.

I assure you that when your basic housing and nutrition are uncertain and missing even a few days of income will result in cascading effects of hunger and homelessness, the underlying stress is overwhelming.

It doesn’t have to be this way, we don’t let bullies steal all the toys on the playground and destroy the very ecosystem that they want to have fun in, why are we letting capital accumulate in the hands of the most effective capitalists at the risk of destroying the very markets that let them succeed.

I say that as a capitalist, if we lose the system because we allow unchecked Monopoly and wealth concentration, we won’t get it back.

Out of curiosity, what is your expected baseline of what the average person and family in the US should be able to afford?

> All the ones I know of use questionable methodology like: "being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage".

Well, that's (at minimum) what you need to raise a family and replace yourself in the labor pool.

It can be both. Look at the stress hormones people live with. Look at other stats like rising infant mortality, dropping IQ etc.

"Listen folks, it's no big deal if you can't afford rent or to purchase a house. Ignore my vacation homes in Aspen, Jackson Hole and Nantucket. Just think about how much better you have it than the people in Haiti and get back to work!"

This isn't relevant to this discussion. You're welcome to go complain on a message board in Mumbai about wages in the US.

If you’re only complaint is the word “abject”, I encourage you to try to live on anywhere from $7 to $15 an hour, in a part-time job that doesn’t guarantee week to week how many hours you’ll get.

That is a very common reality.

This is quickly going to devolve into 'nobody suffers unless their suffering as at least as bad as the worst suffering that exists', so let's just go ahead and get that out of the way and move on to something less pointless.

dozerly. "We have one of the worlds most prosperous economies, and half of the US is living in abject poverty while quality of life for everyone is decreasing." Hacker News, 30 Jun. 2026, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734916

>the top 1% have nearly as much income as the bottom 80%

>link for "Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989"

income =/= wealth

no, he's almost certainly referring to labor productivity. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB

From outside it doesn't look like not being paid enough. It looks like affordability problem. Prices in general are too high.

Rents in general are part of this. Both for housing and commercial property. Somehow getting profit from both rent and appreciation is the goal of the system.

Well that is what population voted for and choose not to overthrow system for so maybe they deserve it.

Restaurant operations is one of the places where it's most clear the rent is the biggest problem.

You can say restaurant workers need to be paid more, and ok sure, but where is that money coming from? You pay labor, food suppliers, rent, utilities, taxes, and... where exactly is the money to pay workers more coming from?

With the number of empty storefronts in my city (not to mention restaurant closures) it's clear owners aren't making money hand over fist or there would be many more restaurants.

Restaurant workers in my experience are more likely to go to more restaurants and they can't because... their rent is too high and the price of food at restaurants is too high.

The common denominator with all of it is money being sucked away from people doing work and people hiring work by... rent seekers.

The "labor share of income" is exactly this. How much money is getting sucked out of the rest of the economy to prop up the do-nothing class. Retired people whose retirement investment was selling a house for much more labor than they bought it for and real estate owners doing as little as they can to maximize income they aren't earning.

If you build plenty of houses, they become affordable. The latest Affordable Housing is mostly gov-enabled scams, at least in San Diego. They are being made for greater costs than the luxury housing since the funding is guaranteed. Then the same developers are incentivized to keep all rates high by building less.

https://sdhc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/107_Workshop_RAN...

Just tax corporate owned vacancy. In a slump there will be apartment buildings that are mostly empty because they refuse to lower the rent as lowering rent triggers property re-valuation.

Office buildings sit mostly empty for the same reason.

Tax the owners to punish the bad bets and eternal growth expectations of banks to force them to use the space to the benefit of the community or be forced to sell when they run out of money. Use zoning laws to prevent the destruction of units to avoid taxes.

repeated efforts to develop "dwelling units" on a large scale have collapsed in corruption. There are financial players who are very aware that there are vast amounts of monthly monies at play. This is not unique to the USA in fact it is a repeated theme in the capital economies.

The US Federal Housing and Urban Development Department was intimately involved in the Savings and Loan collapse of the late 1980s. It was punted around and repeated in the 1990s, but the stock market gains of the late 1990s diluted the news in public. That phase culminated with a dot-com bubble collapse and ultimately, the 2007 dollar credit crisis. Leveraged purchases of real estate were part of that financial soup. Many of the players from that time were "boomers" and their seniors, so living memory of those circumstances are now fading. There are many, many non-fiction books about these topics.

Or the world trade center?

The origin of the word is a bit darker than its meaning, unfortunately. It comes from the Greek word for Uterus. You can kinda fill in the blanks from there as to how it came to its modern meaning.

I'm not the only one with access to data though, if you're wanting to hold to your beliefs unless someone does the legwork for you and attempts to force it on you, I think your bias will overcome. Here is a source to begin anyway.

The middle class (especially upper middle) saw their share of income drop, but the bottom 50% increased.

https://equitablegrowth.org/u-s-income-data-for-2024-shows-t...

Data is the answer, it's just that so few people are willing to look at unbiased data. Although the start is asking a more measurable question.

https://equitablegrowth.org/u-s-income-data-for-2024-shows-t...

Bottom 50% is increasing income with the top 10%, it's the middle class that's declining in the last 5 years. This was a quick google search, so I'll ask you to provide a source that's contrary else your comment was purely rhetorical and made in bad faith.

There is but you have to ignore the lived reality that Americans are struggling to afford healthcare, housing, utilities, education, and food costs all while the ultra wealthy are demanding the public invests trillions into vaporware.

Not American here. I know a couple of people who took out a second mortgage to buy a small appartement to rent out when mortgages rates were at 1%. They probably have €300k in equity in both the primary and secondary home. And around €600 in income from the rental. I do not consider that wealthy.

Most landlords are leveraged up to the hilt. They may look wealthy from the outside but a close look at the figures says otherwise.

The original comment said "ultra wealthy".

You don't have to be especially wealthy to own a second house and rent it out. That isn't poor, certainly, but I wouldn't call it wealthy either.

Income goes straight to a person, capital gains is a little return from other people generating income. Basically a MLM lol.

Capital gains tax is clearly lower than income tax. So why did you change your mind?

If they donate the wealth to their own foundation to continue to hold close and control, it doesn't get taxed. If they borrow against the wealth at low interest rates until they die and the basis is stepped up ("buy, borrow, die"), it doesn't get taxed. Certainly, deferment is a component, but there are obvious examples of the very wealthy operating in a manner to avoid taxes entirely when they're able to (realizing the benefit of the wealth without having to realize a taxable event). Trust stacking is a recent fad as well, although I don't have enough data to say whether it is a material concern from a tax revenue perspective.

Silicon Valley Is Obsessed with 'Trust Stacking,' and the IRS Doesn't Like It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48727963 - June 2026

Was your ‘friend’ Jeffery Epstein?

It hurts the definition of the words when you use ultra wealthy to refer to the top 50%...

Ultra wealthy literally means "beyond wealthy". A double digit percentage of the population, maybe 30-50% belong to the non-laboring class.

If I was talking about "ultra obese" people, you wouldn't assume I was talking about everybody who has a couple of extra pounds?

No, yea that's fair. I think he'd be even more confounded about the current state of affairs though. Just my read.

this is mostly in tech. starbucks barista is not going to get any stocks

More accurate to say that the US has been opposed to workers controlling the firms they work for. But the capitalists dangling just enough of a morsel to get the workers to dance 80 hours a week, but without the ability to actually control anything, and without majorly diluting? Chef's kiss.

None of those gives voting shares to employees.

Thanks very much for providing those sources.

That said, it's a huge pet peeve of mine when someone makes a statement, and then provides sources to back up that statement, but the actual sources contradict their original statement.

You stated "but AIUI this is mostly a statistical illusion caused by changes to US tax law- previously income that was attributed to 'labor' shifted over to LLCs/S corps for more beneficial tax rates." But then your very first linked article states "First, about a third of the decline in the published labor share appears to be an artifact of statistical procedures used to impute the labor income of the self-employed that underlies the headline measure."

I think there is a huge difference between 1/3 (while still a lot and an important factor) and what you wrote, "mostly a statistical illusion", especially since other substantial factors proposed in that article are things like offshoring.

The sheer number of people who would have nothing left to lose would probably fight back, literally, at that point.

People tend to get excited when they can't eat and despite its timidity America is exceptionally well-armed. That sounds cute in a post drone strike world, but if the government attacks its own citizens like that, they'll have a hell of a time defending that position to the rest of the world. Humanity is usually slow on the uptake but eventually settles on "how about you just go fuck yourself" even if the party takes a sec to get going.

Who knows. I think it's better to err on the side of optimism despite the grim outlook.

That is true but likely only temporarily. Why is the single worker even needed?

We tend to have a pretty human-centric worldview so if there's a single human working to keep a hotel running, our default is to attribute all the generated value to them when it really isn't the case. You can imagine that hotel at some point in the near future goes from requiring 1 worker to keep it running to zero.

Industry cartel.

If you landscaper had one like the plumbers do he'd have his own yacht.

Or he wouldn't exist because you'd buy about as much of his services as you do a plumber's.

The mandated low margin is part of the problem. When your margins are regulated, the only way to increase profits is to just make everything more expensive. More revenue, same margin, more profits. Humane health care is incompatible with free market economics.

I don't think the core issue is the health insurance companies stealing money, it's the deep inefficiencies that come from the position the insurance companies hold.

How many man-hours are spent dealing with insurance paperwork? How much do hospitals and doctors spend each year just dealing with that interaction, rather than treating patients?

> Plus they have enormous problems with fraud, waste, and abuse.

I'd say "enormous" requires some evidentiary proof. Obviously there is fraud and waste. But almost all large scale systems have that. We should certainly try to minimize it wherever we can but I don't think "waste and fraud exist" are a reason to not pursue a path.

For what it's worth I know you've worked on FHIR and probably know a lot of details I don't. Actually I'd be interested in talking to you about FHIR.

That said!

1) In the big picture isn't the US clearly paying more than other countries? I'm sure some of this is eg a janitor in the US costs more than a janitor elsewhere, but still...

2) Isn't the cap for the margin that insurance companies can take 20%? That is, they have to pay out 80% as claims take 20% for overhead

3) Doesn't insurance also induce more work done by everyone else who has to deal with them? So the margin the insurance company itself takes is not the only cost they add. Maybe they make providers do more paperwork, or let patients order tests etc that they would not if they were not spending other people's money, or some other reason. Say insurance pays out 80%, but 30% of documentation or actual work is not done by insurance but only exists because of them, now we're down to 56%.

I say this because literally yesterday, my wife, a pediatrician, after she spent the day seeing patients and got home to go through notes, had to leave a message with an insurance company: she saw they faxed her clinic on Saturday, when the clinic was closed, to cancel care for a patient with an ongoing chronic condition with no changes unless the insurance company got a reply in 48 hours (again, while the clinic was closed!). Now she has to schedule some kind of I don't even know what with them, to confirm the condition is the exact same, except she sees patients all day so it's a pain to schedule...

idk the fact that BCBS is a non profit and has no margin in some technical sense does not seem like a big consolation, something is rotten no?

(edit - the insurance company in the anecdote is not BCBS)

As successful as Obamacare has been it didn't really do much to lower the cost of healthcare or claw back the billions wasted to insurance company profits. There might be some kind of regulation just as effective as single payer, but we've never seen it anywhere in the US.

In my experience, insurance issues are usually insurer and patient going back and forth and then patient getting 6 different answers from 6 different representatives, then reviewing the 3000 page plan document, finding the single line that properly describes what should have happened, calling the insurance company, explaining to the rep how your plan works, and demanding that it be reprocessed. Like my wife has to do this frequently and spends several hours per month dealing with this but she has saved us probably tens of thousands of dollars in mis-processed claims that the insurance companies can't even properly handle. I usually am the person carefully reading plan docs, finding the proper billing codes, and explaining things like that to the insurance company. Sometimes we have to get the doctor's billing people to code things, like once they coded something that was an outpatient appointment as a minor surgery which could have cost us a lot of money.

So in my book since we get to speculate about what the system should look like, it should absolutely result in people getting care without all of this run-around. It's about eliminating as much misery as possible from the system and letting people just get treated and providers just get paid. We can talk about efficiency once the misery is gone.

All healthcare systems have some form of rationing. Even if your doctor thinks something is medically necessary it can only get done if the system actually has capacity.

In most countries where there is universal coverage with a single payer, certain expensive treatments have long waiting lists or are simply unavailable at any price. Thus we see wealthy Canadians coming to the USA as medical tourists and paying cash for procedures like MRI scans or joint replacements in order to avoid the queue back home. There are always trade-offs, it's just a matter of what we want to prioritize.

> would be very unhappy.

Significantly increasing the supply of doctors would solve that, though.

> but an orthopaedic surgeon being paid the $300k USD-equivalent in Germany instead of his $750k USD income today at median would be very unhappy.

I'm sure he'll manage.

The problem is, quite simply, insurance.

When something is paid for from a big nebulous ball of money rather than straight out of people's pockets, the downward pressure on prices just isn't there in the same way. The conversations between practitioners and insurers are about whether something is necessary, not about whether or not the practitioner is charging too much for it.

Here in the UK we see it, too - not so much in human healthcare since we have the NHS - but very definitely in animal healthcare; vets' bills have skyrocketed over the last couple of decades, in a mutually-reinforcing feedback loop with the rise in pet health insurance.

Health care costs across the developed world have skyrocketed for exactly the same structural reasons. Yes, implementations have been different in their details, but the larger structure is the same no matter where you look in the developed world. Government intervention has increased. That means more top-down management and less bottom-up self-organization based on private property and individual incentives.

This is not some spurious speculation. That market-based systems drive down costs enormously is replicated across dozens upon dozens of industries. It's one of the most replicable results in economics to the extent that economics can be replicable. As for why the costs in other countries are not quite as high as the U.S., it's because health care costs also increase as per capita GDP increases and the U.S. has higher per capita GDP. Moreover, because the U.S. has some aspects of its health care system still living more in the private sector, there is less top-down rationing. Other countries see very clear examples of rationing, so people spend less on end-of-life care.

That sounds good to me. Why should millions of Americans die every year because they can't afford their medications just so that other countries can get their meds at extremely low prices? Let's also have the US government negotiate our prices and let things even out across the board.