Steve Kranz

this is insane. yale basically explains why your paycheck stopped being enough. ian shapiro opens his course on power and politics with a simple question: how did we go from the optimism of 1989 to inequality, distrust, and populist anger today? one answer is money. and the numbers from the article make his argument much harder to ignore. since 1980, labor's share of u.s. income fell from 58% to 51%, while corporate profits went from roughly 7% to nearly 12%. that sounds like a few percentage points. at the scale of a $29 trillion economy, it's trillions of dollars shifting from labor toward capital. shapiro points to the political side of the same story: unions got weaker, business got stronger, and workers lost bargaining power while capital gained influence. the money followed. the tax system moved in the same direction. in the 1950s, corporate taxes provided more than 20% of federal revenue. today it's under 10%. meanwhile payroll taxes became one of the government's biggest sources of revenue. but the article shows where this divide becomes personal. $10,000 compounding at the stock market's historical 10% becomes roughly $174,000 in 30 years. the same $10,000 growing at the 1.4% pace of wages becomes about $15,000. same money. same 30 years. almost 12x apart. that's the connection between shapiro's lecture and the article. one explains how power shifted. the other shows where the money went. labor lost leverage. capital accumulated wealth. and wealth created even more leverage. which helps explain the question shapiro is asking in the first place: why decades of economic growth could produce so much political frustration. people didn't stop working. the economics of owning simply became much more powerful than the economics of earning. the full lecture and article are below.