"whether the folks who are prone to block such solutions—as the status quo serves them well—are comfortable with the pitchfork risk such blocking engenders"
They likely feel they are insulated from the pitchfork risk. The billionaire/donor class has extensive private security, their own airplanes, well protected retreats, surrounding sycophants, etc. They have a president eager to deploy force against uppity protestors - ICE, Hegseth reconfiguring military leadership with loyalists, pardoning and attempting to reward MAGA rioters, etc., etc., etc. Plus a Supreme Court eager to stamp out voting rights and insulate them from democracy.
Sachs discussed the topic of labor share within the interview (starting a little after 6 minutes in).
However, really, I plopped down the interview more because it includes some clips of Kevin Hassett, apparently on the White House North Lawn.
And in particular, it was fun to see Sachs react (twice) to the standard smile of Kevin Hassett, as a smile indicating deception.
I have taken the Hassett continuously-present smile as a sign of deception from before he had his Trump White House role.
(I judge on content, not superficial things like body language or types of smiles, but it was fun to see that I am not the only person in the world reacting to the Kevin Hassett smile in the way I do.)
Forgive me. This is substantially redundant with prior comments in JB.
Still, I want to put down this precise version of it, because it makes clear that there is at least one case of data that has usually been released on the ACA on-exchange coverage numbers, that has not been released by CMS.
(Thus, if it were unemployment data or inflation data that is regularly released, a thousand economists would point out the absence of data.
In this case, policy-wonky Charles Gaba caught it, and from reading his Substack, I am now aware.
I don’t know if anyone else is aware!)
(The policy issue in focus in the comment is of the lapse of the ACA expanded subsidies that the Republicans made happen on 1/1/26, and the loss of coverage from that, which numbers are starting to roll in on, which look pretty large.
As well, leaked information exists that the coverage losses have become evident to CMS internally. And that CMS is planning a misleading propagandistic response, claiming that the losses are due mainly to the administration's successful crackdown on ACA fraud.)
--
So, on the ACA expanded subsidies that were allowed to lapse 1/1/26, data has been starting to roll in from non-federal sources showing something like 3 to 5 million people, of 24 million who had coverage on the ACA exchanges in 2025, losing coverage.
This information available to the public is part of the new data that continuously rolls in from non-federal non-CMS sources, as initial very limited open-enrollment-period only data, which counts people auto-renewed as having coverage, even if they don't wind up paying the premium, gets superseded. (That limited initial data showed only a 4.9% enrollment drop for those 24 million.)
(Incidentally, you can find out about all of these coverage losses, information on which is still rolling in, the most quickly if you subscribe to Charles Gaba, ( https://charlesgaba.substack.com/ ), where his posts contain each bit of information usually on the same day it becomes available.)
In any case, after releasing the initial open-enrollment-period data for 2026 showing only a 4.9% drop in enrollment, with the big defect in the data that people who wind not paying the premium are not counted as dropping coverage, I don't believe anything has been released by CMS (Dr. Oz's Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, which also manages the ACA).
The much larger coverage-drop numbers indicated in the KFF and NY Times reports, counting people not paying premiums as dropping, have come from other sources. (State exchanges, KFF surveys, and a major consulting company report with access to insurance company data.)
So, has the CMS been blocking the release of information on the coverage drops?
Charles Gaba actually caught one case where the data, usually presented as part of a report on Medicare and Medicaid and CHIP, was omitted.
"Until now, the summary report also included a brief mention of total effectuated ACA marketplace enrollment in Qualified Health Plans (QHPs), rounded off to the nearest 100,000. As of December effectuated enrollment was ~21.8 million people.
However, starting this month, this data point is missing...and that’s not by accident; it includes this footnote:
As of the January 2026 data, Marketplace enrollment data are no longer included in this report but will be available separately soon."
So, we may already have a case of data usually made available being suppressed.
Otherwise, on the data within CMS, I don't know if they usually release it and are holding it back, but we know they have it. Further, they appear to be preparing to falsely claim the coverage drops are due to reduction of fraud on the exchange.
The source is this recent NOTUS story by former Washington Post Reporter Paige Winfield Cunningham, which post seems to access leaked information from people inside of CMS:
"More than one in five people who enrolled in health insurance through http://healthcare.gov/ during open enrollment and in the weeks immediately following were dropped from coverage for failing to pay their first month’s premium, according to internal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, documents obtained by NOTUS that haven’t been made public.
The roughly 21% decline in enrollment in the 30 states using the federal marketplace is significantly higher than the rate of last year, when 12% of enrollees dropped off over the same time frame.
The numbers support widespread fears that the end of extra, pandemic-era subsidies, which congressional Republicans declined to extend in December, would leave Affordable Care Act plans unaffordable for some Americans.
Faced with such a stark drop in enrollment, leadership at CMS, which is led by Administrator Mehmet Oz, is seeking to attribute a majority of the enrollment declines to rooting out fraud rather than people not paying their premiums, according to three CMS sources. The sources said it’s unlikely fraud is behind most of the cancellations."
Charles conclusion is that it looks like, of 24 million people who had on-exchange ACA coverage, about 3 million (12%) are without coverage as of the current time this year, due to the lapsing of the ACA expanded subsidies on Jan 1, 2026.
--
I might as well toss this in, for those interested. I think there is starting to be evidence of the erroneous claims coming that the coverage drops are due to the administration stopping fraud on the ACA exchanges, emanating from Dr. Oz and the Paragon Health Institute. To save space, for those interested, its in a comment elsewhere, this one:
The One Big Beautiful Bill cuts, timed to be after the election and start beginning of 2027, are a separate part of the cuts. They affect mostly people on the expanded-Medicaid half of the ACA, rather than the on-exchange half.
I, myself, predict massive technical foul ups when that starts, since 51 separate state and D.C. Medicaid agencies, many under-resourced and not that technically adept, have to deal with new work requirements, and more frequent (twice a year minimum) Medicaid eligibility checks.
But, the bonus content is the pointing to a NY Times article of yesterday indicating the administration is making the work-requirements verification, in the case of people with medical issues, more difficult.
Frankly, it looks pretty bleak to me. The damage to the ACA that has been done is quite substantial, and the earliest possible attempt to reverse this would seem to be Jan 20, 2029. (Assuming all elections work out.)
Defining income from labor vs business has had a large role in the debate of Graham Platner in the Maine Senate race and whether he is truly “working class”.
Anyone would agree that if worked for wages at an oyster farm he would qualify as working class, but since he part-owns the oyster farm some classify him as a small businessman even though he is doing the same labor and not making much money, ie, living a “working class” lifestyle.
Is a self-employed plumber who owns a truck and some tools and has no employees working class or not? Is his income labor or business profit?
I had to read Question #2 a couple of times. “People who are prone to block such solutions” aren’t just the uber wealthy; there’s around 77 million blockers, many of whom are feeling the pinch these days when filling the tanks on their Ram Hemi 4x4s. You can’t fix stupid.
In micro businesses, where the owner is also providing the product or service, I don't think "labor" is identical to hourly labor in say manufacturing. The business owner is responsible for everything the business requires at all times, the hourly worker is simply responsible to provide a fixed amount of labor. It's often hard to quantify as a business owner what your labor is across the dozens of levels of skills and expertise needed for the various aspects that owning and running a business requires. If for example you told the business owner to just do the labor he did as an employee his workload would go down about 80% and the business would fail. The two "labors" are not interchangeable. It's not a simple substitution.
The "labor share" is a complicated and untrusty metric, as you explain. Apparently wage income has not risen as quickly as total income. At my blog I posted about the CBO report "Income Distribution, 1979 to 2022":
"cash wages and salaries" for the middle 20% rose by 9% over 43 years, from $47,600 to $52,000 (a gain of $4,400). . . The top 1% saw their average total income increase by $2,036,200 (from $664,700 to $2,700,900), an increase of 306% (quadrupling)."
And I also quoted the RealTime Inequality page that shows pre-tax income growth for the lower-earning 50%, adults 20 - 64, "gaining $4,400, from $22,600 to $27,000. The top earning 1% saw their income grow by $1,575,000, from $525,000 to $2,100,00, an exact quadrupling or 300%."
It is stark, and that's why I included just the top and bottom.
About 40% of U.S. household live with significant economic hardship. I support that claim with various studies. I've been looking at the SNAP program recently -- 1 of 8 citizens gets their food from the federal government. They receive about $6.20 per day per person says the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. The Urban Institute says that stipend is enough to buy two meals only. What sort of nation do we live in? The national Disposable Income is at $18 trillion or about $128,000 per household, and 12% of households can't afford food?
Evidently about 27% of households have incomes below the SNAP threshold, 138% of FPL. That's about 95 million citizens, but only 42 million access SNAP, the participation rate is 41% says the ALICE report from United Way charity. I can on for hours about this. Days, weeks, months, etc.
Well as it happens, I'm also a gigging jazz musician who makes my main living as an economist. I'm pretty sure I've personally been bringing down the labor share of income because I am earning about the same amount per hour, IN NOMINAL TERMS, as a gigging jazz musician as I did in about 1980. At least my productivity hasn't increased (no matter how hard I try, I can only produce one hour of music, and for that matter, one hour of economics lectures per hour), so at least I'm not helping enrich THE MAN through productivity improvements. If you're ever in DC and are still playing, we can jam!
Thank you. I have printed and posted a copy of this photo next to my computer as a reminder of the importance of labor's share of productivity. As this photo suggests, pitchforks and firebrands are a time tested response to rising inflation and a growing share of gains going to capital owners.
A couple of important points: the biggest change in the NIPA data is the drop in proprietor income from 1940’s to 1969 which is a larger share of GDP than the increase in corporate profits but also the share going to wages reached a minimum at the end of 1969; and the income of many high paid individuals shifted from wage to stock grants. Every one of my friends from grad school (chemistry, physics, biochemistry) who worked in the private sector received a large share of total compensation as stock grants. They are paid well relative to median wages but in fact much of their lifetime earnings is from stock (low end not so, eg $1M in stock, but many retired early with $8M-$50+M in stock). That is a huge change where top technical talent creating new knowledge and new products is paid through capital and not wages. So beyond the S corp shift you have the change in compensation to the people who are actually creating much of the new wealth. In a different sense the pay of upper level management between private businesses with public stock and not for profit organizations is striking. The wages of a nonprofit senior executives are, relative to revenue, typically very high vs. corporate executives because there is no stock compensation in the nonprofit world. As technology advances basic economics means those with technical talent will be more valuable. There exist many people who don’t know even basic calculus, the foundation of almost all technology both at the basic science level through engineering and finance. A huge source of the massive economic growth delivered by modern technology is because of the science and engineering of PhD and beyond educated people. This creates a difficult dynamic for the economy. In real terms the highly intelligent, highly educated, people moving humanity forward are underpaid relative to their real impact, but still highly paid relative to median income. This again just falls out of the mathematics. For society overall there is a complex dynamic to work through when the intelligence and education required keep pushing the ball forward increases and is then limited to the smaller tail of the human distribution. Modern AI will increase this stress. Intelligent critical thinkers see LLM AI as a useful but crude and limited tool for advancing human knowledge while others see it as a mystical threat. A person who understands Hilbert spaces sees LLM AI as never being able to deliver real intelligence but relatively few people understand mathematics at the required level. AI will make the smartest people smarter and the masses more cognitively limited. Inequality is going to increase.
Just reporting, in case people missed it, that the New York Times has had a pair of editorials consistent with the JB "Affordability Agenda". Specifically, the part of the Agenda about loosening up supply-side regulatory constraints, such as excessively tight zoning, on housing construction.
Thus, a few weeks ago the editorial "America Needs to Build More Housing",
And just three days ago, "How to Stop the Affluent from Rigging the Housing Market: Blue States Like Massachusetts Need to Be Part of the Solution" which focuses on the same relaxation of housing-restrictions issue, except specifically in Massachusetts.:
This second editorial, incidentally, as a fun and somewhat-informative interactive plot (don't neglect to click on the little circles!). I was unable to extract all of the information I really wanted from it, and I wonder exactly what they are using for price-to-income ratio, and in any case it's some sort of an average--not a more helpful distribution. (Wealth missing, etc., etc.) But something can be learned from the graphic.
--
(The second editorial's implied assertion, that the excessive restrictions are much more of a blue state thing than a red state thing, has already been made by Krugman, Ezra Klein, Nicholas Kristof, and others on the left.)
--
Relatedly, I do point out that here in Massachusetts, (where I live), legislation to allow towns and cities the option of enacting rent control is being considered in the state. (Towns and cities do not currently have this option under Massachusetts law.)
That second Times editorial I referenced also comes out against allowing any rent control in Massachusetts.
Now, I don’t endorse or condemn rent control. But I feel the informed citizen ought to take note of that particular Times recommendation.
My feeling is, a well-conceived rent control, while it does not generate new housing, and may somewhat inhibit it, still can be helpful in preventing excessive rent hikes for people who already have rental housing. Which has something to be said for it.
I do believe the New York City example is considered a poorly-conceived, or at least poorly-managed rent control. And, of course, our political system being what it is, it may be impossible to get a well-conceived, well-managed rent control system.
People who have observed the media, and the New York Times, for a long time, will know to be aware that special interests behind the scenes, or ideology behind the scenes, is something that one needs to consider in evaluating the Times editorial. (Read Chomsky/Herman’s “Manufacturing Consent” if you don’t agree!)
Anyway, presuming JB readers are epistemically highly competent and pose no danger from running wild with a fact and making erroneous conclusions, l’ll just drop down the tidbit that much of the Canadian rental market has rent control.
“Any apartment, house, condo, basement or mobile home that someone has lived in since before Nov. 15, 2018 is covered by rent control. That doesn't mean rent can't go up. It means that rent can be increased once a year and the provincial government decides by how much.”
Even better, across Canada, by province, the info is here:
In spite of these troubling datapoints my retirement portfolio keeps increasing, and, yes, the role of the “magnificent seven” outliers, are driving the market. On one hand, that amputee economist trope, troubling bits and pieces signaling trouble while the market flies, is Sorkin collecting data on his the crash of 202_ book?
"whether the folks who are prone to block such solutions—as the status quo serves them well—are comfortable with the pitchfork risk such blocking engenders"
They likely feel they are insulated from the pitchfork risk. The billionaire/donor class has extensive private security, their own airplanes, well protected retreats, surrounding sycophants, etc. They have a president eager to deploy force against uppity protestors - ICE, Hegseth reconfiguring military leadership with loyalists, pardoning and attempting to reward MAGA rioters, etc., etc., etc. Plus a Supreme Court eager to stamp out voting rights and insulate them from democracy.
I happened to catch a recent Jeffrey Sachs interview on economic matters,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBoG-fLgfKU .
Sachs discussed the topic of labor share within the interview (starting a little after 6 minutes in).
However, really, I plopped down the interview more because it includes some clips of Kevin Hassett, apparently on the White House North Lawn.
And in particular, it was fun to see Sachs react (twice) to the standard smile of Kevin Hassett, as a smile indicating deception.
I have taken the Hassett continuously-present smile as a sign of deception from before he had his Trump White House role.
(I judge on content, not superficial things like body language or types of smiles, but it was fun to see that I am not the only person in the world reacting to the Kevin Hassett smile in the way I do.)
Forgive me. This is substantially redundant with prior comments in JB.
Still, I want to put down this precise version of it, because it makes clear that there is at least one case of data that has usually been released on the ACA on-exchange coverage numbers, that has not been released by CMS.
(Thus, if it were unemployment data or inflation data that is regularly released, a thousand economists would point out the absence of data.
In this case, policy-wonky Charles Gaba caught it, and from reading his Substack, I am now aware.
I don’t know if anyone else is aware!)
(The policy issue in focus in the comment is of the lapse of the ACA expanded subsidies that the Republicans made happen on 1/1/26, and the loss of coverage from that, which numbers are starting to roll in on, which look pretty large.
As well, leaked information exists that the coverage losses have become evident to CMS internally. And that CMS is planning a misleading propagandistic response, claiming that the losses are due mainly to the administration's successful crackdown on ACA fraud.)
--
So, on the ACA expanded subsidies that were allowed to lapse 1/1/26, data has been starting to roll in from non-federal sources showing something like 3 to 5 million people, of 24 million who had coverage on the ACA exchanges in 2025, losing coverage.
This information available to the public is part of the new data that continuously rolls in from non-federal non-CMS sources, as initial very limited open-enrollment-period only data, which counts people auto-renewed as having coverage, even if they don't wind up paying the premium, gets superseded. (That limited initial data showed only a 4.9% enrollment drop for those 24 million.)
There is a nice 5/19/2026 KFF report that summarizes the higher post-open-enrollment-report drops, looking to be 3 to 5 million, here https://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/what-we-know-so-far-about-2026-aca-marketplace-enrollment-premiums-and-deductibles/ )
There is also a very good NY Times story, from a few weeks before the KFF report, showing similar numbers, from similar sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/business/obamacare-enrollment-decline.html .
(Incidentally, you can find out about all of these coverage losses, information on which is still rolling in, the most quickly if you subscribe to Charles Gaba, ( https://charlesgaba.substack.com/ ), where his posts contain each bit of information usually on the same day it becomes available.)
In any case, after releasing the initial open-enrollment-period data for 2026 showing only a 4.9% drop in enrollment, with the big defect in the data that people who wind not paying the premium are not counted as dropping coverage, I don't believe anything has been released by CMS (Dr. Oz's Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, which also manages the ACA).
The much larger coverage-drop numbers indicated in the KFF and NY Times reports, counting people not paying premiums as dropping, have come from other sources. (State exchanges, KFF surveys, and a major consulting company report with access to insurance company data.)
So, has the CMS been blocking the release of information on the coverage drops?
Charles Gaba actually caught one case where the data, usually presented as part of a report on Medicare and Medicaid and CHIP, was omitted.
Charles reports on that here: https://charlesgaba.substack.com/p/cms-posts-january-2026-medicaid-chip
Quoting Charles:
"Until now, the summary report also included a brief mention of total effectuated ACA marketplace enrollment in Qualified Health Plans (QHPs), rounded off to the nearest 100,000. As of December effectuated enrollment was ~21.8 million people.
However, starting this month, this data point is missing...and that’s not by accident; it includes this footnote:
As of the January 2026 data, Marketplace enrollment data are no longer included in this report but will be available separately soon."
So, we may already have a case of data usually made available being suppressed.
Otherwise, on the data within CMS, I don't know if they usually release it and are holding it back, but we know they have it. Further, they appear to be preparing to falsely claim the coverage drops are due to reduction of fraud on the exchange.
The source is this recent NOTUS story by former Washington Post Reporter Paige Winfield Cunningham, which post seems to access leaked information from people inside of CMS:
https://www.notus.org/healthcare/aca-healthcare-dropped-insurance-numbers-subsidies
Quoting that:
"More than one in five people who enrolled in health insurance through http://healthcare.gov/ during open enrollment and in the weeks immediately following were dropped from coverage for failing to pay their first month’s premium, according to internal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, documents obtained by NOTUS that haven’t been made public.
The roughly 21% decline in enrollment in the 30 states using the federal marketplace is significantly higher than the rate of last year, when 12% of enrollees dropped off over the same time frame.
The numbers support widespread fears that the end of extra, pandemic-era subsidies, which congressional Republicans declined to extend in December, would leave Affordable Care Act plans unaffordable for some Americans.
Faced with such a stark drop in enrollment, leadership at CMS, which is led by Administrator Mehmet Oz, is seeking to attribute a majority of the enrollment declines to rooting out fraud rather than people not paying their premiums, according to three CMS sources. The sources said it’s unlikely fraud is behind most of the cancellations."
(I and other readers of Charles Gaba's substack were pointed to the leaked information in NOTUS by his post: https://charlesgaba.substack.com/p/breaking-cms-admits-over-30-million )
Charles conclusion is that it looks like, of 24 million people who had on-exchange ACA coverage, about 3 million (12%) are without coverage as of the current time this year, due to the lapsing of the ACA expanded subsidies on Jan 1, 2026.
--
I might as well toss this in, for those interested. I think there is starting to be evidence of the erroneous claims coming that the coverage drops are due to the administration stopping fraud on the ACA exchanges, emanating from Dr. Oz and the Paragon Health Institute. To save space, for those interested, its in a comment elsewhere, this one:
https://econjared.substack.com/p/why-are-people-so-damn-mad/comment/261555717
--
BONUS CONTENT:
The One Big Beautiful Bill cuts, timed to be after the election and start beginning of 2027, are a separate part of the cuts. They affect mostly people on the expanded-Medicaid half of the ACA, rather than the on-exchange half.
I, myself, predict massive technical foul ups when that starts, since 51 separate state and D.C. Medicaid agencies, many under-resourced and not that technically adept, have to deal with new work requirements, and more frequent (twice a year minimum) Medicaid eligibility checks.
But, the bonus content is the pointing to a NY Times article of yesterday indicating the administration is making the work-requirements verification, in the case of people with medical issues, more difficult.
That's here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/upshot/trump-medicaid-work-requirements.html
--
Frankly, it looks pretty bleak to me. The damage to the ACA that has been done is quite substantial, and the earliest possible attempt to reverse this would seem to be Jan 20, 2029. (Assuming all elections work out.)
Defining income from labor vs business has had a large role in the debate of Graham Platner in the Maine Senate race and whether he is truly “working class”.
Anyone would agree that if worked for wages at an oyster farm he would qualify as working class, but since he part-owns the oyster farm some classify him as a small businessman even though he is doing the same labor and not making much money, ie, living a “working class” lifestyle.
Is a self-employed plumber who owns a truck and some tools and has no employees working class or not? Is his income labor or business profit?
I had to read Question #2 a couple of times. “People who are prone to block such solutions” aren’t just the uber wealthy; there’s around 77 million blockers, many of whom are feeling the pinch these days when filling the tanks on their Ram Hemi 4x4s. You can’t fix stupid.
In micro businesses, where the owner is also providing the product or service, I don't think "labor" is identical to hourly labor in say manufacturing. The business owner is responsible for everything the business requires at all times, the hourly worker is simply responsible to provide a fixed amount of labor. It's often hard to quantify as a business owner what your labor is across the dozens of levels of skills and expertise needed for the various aspects that owning and running a business requires. If for example you told the business owner to just do the labor he did as an employee his workload would go down about 80% and the business would fail. The two "labors" are not interchangeable. It's not a simple substitution.
The "labor share" is a complicated and untrusty metric, as you explain. Apparently wage income has not risen as quickly as total income. At my blog I posted about the CBO report "Income Distribution, 1979 to 2022":
"cash wages and salaries" for the middle 20% rose by 9% over 43 years, from $47,600 to $52,000 (a gain of $4,400). . . The top 1% saw their average total income increase by $2,036,200 (from $664,700 to $2,700,900), an increase of 306% (quadrupling)."
And I also quoted the RealTime Inequality page that shows pre-tax income growth for the lower-earning 50%, adults 20 - 64, "gaining $4,400, from $22,600 to $27,000. The top earning 1% saw their income grow by $1,575,000, from $525,000 to $2,100,00, an exact quadrupling or 300%."
It is stark, and that's why I included just the top and bottom.
My blog: http://benL88.blogspot.com
About 40% of U.S. household live with significant economic hardship. I support that claim with various studies. I've been looking at the SNAP program recently -- 1 of 8 citizens gets their food from the federal government. They receive about $6.20 per day per person says the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. The Urban Institute says that stipend is enough to buy two meals only. What sort of nation do we live in? The national Disposable Income is at $18 trillion or about $128,000 per household, and 12% of households can't afford food?
Evidently about 27% of households have incomes below the SNAP threshold, 138% of FPL. That's about 95 million citizens, but only 42 million access SNAP, the participation rate is 41% says the ALICE report from United Way charity. I can on for hours about this. Days, weeks, months, etc.
Well as it happens, I'm also a gigging jazz musician who makes my main living as an economist. I'm pretty sure I've personally been bringing down the labor share of income because I am earning about the same amount per hour, IN NOMINAL TERMS, as a gigging jazz musician as I did in about 1980. At least my productivity hasn't increased (no matter how hard I try, I can only produce one hour of music, and for that matter, one hour of economics lectures per hour), so at least I'm not helping enrich THE MAN through productivity improvements. If you're ever in DC and are still playing, we can jam!
Thank you. I have printed and posted a copy of this photo next to my computer as a reminder of the importance of labor's share of productivity. As this photo suggests, pitchforks and firebrands are a time tested response to rising inflation and a growing share of gains going to capital owners.
A couple of important points: the biggest change in the NIPA data is the drop in proprietor income from 1940’s to 1969 which is a larger share of GDP than the increase in corporate profits but also the share going to wages reached a minimum at the end of 1969; and the income of many high paid individuals shifted from wage to stock grants. Every one of my friends from grad school (chemistry, physics, biochemistry) who worked in the private sector received a large share of total compensation as stock grants. They are paid well relative to median wages but in fact much of their lifetime earnings is from stock (low end not so, eg $1M in stock, but many retired early with $8M-$50+M in stock). That is a huge change where top technical talent creating new knowledge and new products is paid through capital and not wages. So beyond the S corp shift you have the change in compensation to the people who are actually creating much of the new wealth. In a different sense the pay of upper level management between private businesses with public stock and not for profit organizations is striking. The wages of a nonprofit senior executives are, relative to revenue, typically very high vs. corporate executives because there is no stock compensation in the nonprofit world. As technology advances basic economics means those with technical talent will be more valuable. There exist many people who don’t know even basic calculus, the foundation of almost all technology both at the basic science level through engineering and finance. A huge source of the massive economic growth delivered by modern technology is because of the science and engineering of PhD and beyond educated people. This creates a difficult dynamic for the economy. In real terms the highly intelligent, highly educated, people moving humanity forward are underpaid relative to their real impact, but still highly paid relative to median income. This again just falls out of the mathematics. For society overall there is a complex dynamic to work through when the intelligence and education required keep pushing the ball forward increases and is then limited to the smaller tail of the human distribution. Modern AI will increase this stress. Intelligent critical thinkers see LLM AI as a useful but crude and limited tool for advancing human knowledge while others see it as a mystical threat. A person who understands Hilbert spaces sees LLM AI as never being able to deliver real intelligence but relatively few people understand mathematics at the required level. AI will make the smartest people smarter and the masses more cognitively limited. Inequality is going to increase.
Just reporting, in case people missed it, that the New York Times has had a pair of editorials consistent with the JB "Affordability Agenda". Specifically, the part of the Agenda about loosening up supply-side regulatory constraints, such as excessively tight zoning, on housing construction.
Thus, a few weeks ago the editorial "America Needs to Build More Housing",
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/18/opinion/affordable-housing-america.html .
And just three days ago, "How to Stop the Affluent from Rigging the Housing Market: Blue States Like Massachusetts Need to Be Part of the Solution" which focuses on the same relaxation of housing-restrictions issue, except specifically in Massachusetts.:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/opinion/affordable-housing-lot-size-ballot-initiative.html
This second editorial, incidentally, as a fun and somewhat-informative interactive plot (don't neglect to click on the little circles!). I was unable to extract all of the information I really wanted from it, and I wonder exactly what they are using for price-to-income ratio, and in any case it's some sort of an average--not a more helpful distribution. (Wealth missing, etc., etc.) But something can be learned from the graphic.
--
(The second editorial's implied assertion, that the excessive restrictions are much more of a blue state thing than a red state thing, has already been made by Krugman, Ezra Klein, Nicholas Kristof, and others on the left.)
--
Relatedly, I do point out that here in Massachusetts, (where I live), legislation to allow towns and cities the option of enacting rent control is being considered in the state. (Towns and cities do not currently have this option under Massachusetts law.)
That second Times editorial I referenced also comes out against allowing any rent control in Massachusetts.
Now, I don’t endorse or condemn rent control. But I feel the informed citizen ought to take note of that particular Times recommendation.
My feeling is, a well-conceived rent control, while it does not generate new housing, and may somewhat inhibit it, still can be helpful in preventing excessive rent hikes for people who already have rental housing. Which has something to be said for it.
I do believe the New York City example is considered a poorly-conceived, or at least poorly-managed rent control. And, of course, our political system being what it is, it may be impossible to get a well-conceived, well-managed rent control system.
People who have observed the media, and the New York Times, for a long time, will know to be aware that special interests behind the scenes, or ideology behind the scenes, is something that one needs to consider in evaluating the Times editorial. (Read Chomsky/Herman’s “Manufacturing Consent” if you don’t agree!)
Anyway, presuming JB readers are epistemically highly competent and pose no danger from running wild with a fact and making erroneous conclusions, l’ll just drop down the tidbit that much of the Canadian rental market has rent control.
Throughout Ontario, for instance. See: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/how-does-rent-control-in-ontario-work-1.6978670 ,
where it says:
“Any apartment, house, condo, basement or mobile home that someone has lived in since before Nov. 15, 2018 is covered by rent control. That doesn't mean rent can't go up. It means that rent can be increased once a year and the provincial government decides by how much.”
Even better, across Canada, by province, the info is here:
https://housingrightscanada.com/resources/rent-control-policies-across-canada/
Related to this, Alex Imas wrote in Substack´s Ghosts of Electricity a very interesting article about the future of work.
In spite of these troubling datapoints my retirement portfolio keeps increasing, and, yes, the role of the “magnificent seven” outliers, are driving the market. On one hand, that amputee economist trope, troubling bits and pieces signaling trouble while the market flies, is Sorkin collecting data on his the crash of 202_ book?