US Wages Share of GDI at 75 Year Low

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA

99•omgwtfbyobbq•1h ago

Comments

BLKNSLVR•1h ago

This is purely data with no narrative attached, which is sort of refreshing.

The un-answered question is what is now eating up the percentage that was going to wages?

What are the options? R&D, shareholders, lawyers, advertising/marketing/PR, share buy-backs, political lobbying (cough bribery cough), strategic reserves?

bediger4000•1h ago

We know it isn't R&D. That got done by universities, and we're in the process of gutting them.

HWR_14•59m ago

Not just universities. Large tech companies have been excellent at funding R&D.

stonogo•56m ago

This turns out not to be the case.

cft•55m ago

Right, from Wright brothers airplane to modern GPT LLMs founders, they were all university researchers that are now being gutted by Trump:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6adedaac-c650-83e8-bb64-c30c1170fa...

lotrg•36m ago

Unless a calamity throws human survivors back to the stone age there can be no future Wright brothers, in the post Tevatron and LHC, James Webb telescope era there will be no new Woz, no new Jobs... 2-3 people in a garage or hanger soldering and welding

Any yet unseen discoveries will require teams of people composing something on the scale of...AI robots and Wolverine like regenerative medicine

And Google and such ...hired PhDs to do that work so they could own it and not have them release it without permission. They weren't hiring basement tinkers.

Look beyond the syntactic totems of power like brand names and logos and it's just soylent green. The contemporary legal and PR gibberish defining ownership and hyping yet another chat app are not real; it's just physics.

cft•22m ago

Only 17% of people who laid out LLM transformer foundations between 2017 and 2022 had relevant PhDs. Not that I expect it would sway your faith or stop the downvotes, but just quoting anyway:

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6adee2ceae408191b155de89259ed240

lotrg•13m ago

Lmao "look their own AI says their effort and accomplishments were noble and altruistic; what more do you need?"

...it was their final, most essential command...

Will most def use local models to generate code and frontier to guide that local process but it's obviously a text generator that can be weighted to emit whatever Altman or Dario and the rest of big tech (and their inherent self selecting biological imperative) believe is best for them

JumpCrisscross•55m ago

> what is now eating up the percentage that was going to wages?

Here you go [1].

Wages and salaries are down 0.4 percentage points from ‘24, 0.75 from ‘15 and 5 from 2000 [2].

Corporate profits after taxes are up 5 percentage points from 2000, of which 2 percentage points went to dividend increases and 3 percentage points to undistributed profits. (Also of note, private consumption of fixed capital +2pp, same as rental income.)

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=53&eid=42185 2025

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=53&eid=42185&...

omgwtfbyobbq•47m ago

The quarterly data is more recent.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=53&eid=17636

verdverm•50m ago

there are only two ways to make money - labor and capital - broadly speaking, and continued data points like this one is why the word Oligarchy is increasing in usage... most of us see it and feel it

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=GDIA,GDICOMPA,

skew-aberration•48m ago

All (the value) of the things produced goes ultimately to either labor (wages), capital (interest), or land (rent) - Adam Smith. (tax being an intermediary for the same).

If wages are down then rent or interest returns are up.

Market interest rates are trending up in recent years but in line with / below long term averages.

So obviously rent is doing the heavy lifting. GFC, housing crisis, etc, are all products of the extreme rents and land speculation.

Where does rent go? It can be consumed (luxury goods, etc) but most of it 'grounds out' in labor and capital through subsequent investments.

So higher share going to rent actually looks like larger luxury consumption by the landowners, more services consumed by them, and (probably most significantly) larger capital investments domestically and internationally - huge AI and semiconductor investments, robotics and EV factory build outs, complicated R&D programs, etc). These go on to employ more laborers globally - with the key change being that the return to laborers within any one investment is historically low.

Money is only an intermediary. It is the flow of goods produced (machines built, technologies developed) and services and resources which really matters.

adrianN•10m ago

A portion also goes to fighting entropy. Keeping infrastructure intact for example consumes value just for maintaining the status quo.

skew-aberration•3m ago

Technically speaking, maintenance is a capital investment.

testing22321•48m ago

Wages for the upper tier, but not in the form of wages

rayiner•44m ago

The economic accounting doesn’t map nearly into what you think of as “labor” and “capital.” For example, the non-labor share includes things like depreciation: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/capital-is-not-taking-half-of...

xyzzy123•43m ago

Naively, people have been working for 75 years over the span of the graph to create valuable IP, scalable manufacturing, unique organisational capabilities, partnerships etc.

If capital is being created faster than it degrades or is destroyed, wouldn't we expect its share of income to increase over time?

It's not obvious to me why labour's share should necessarily remain constant as the economy accumulates hard-to-replicate productive assets.

SwellJoe•17m ago

Because society breaks down when there is an elite class of people who are so wealthy the law no longer applies to them, while a significant portion of people are on the brink of being homeless, and many more are one health emergency away from it.

weberer•38m ago

I don't think you understand the graph. This is what percentage of income comes from wages. So for every dollar that people earned as income on their tax sheet, 42% was listed as coming from wages. The other 58% comes from other sources like non-wage employer compensation, rental income, private business income, etc.

You can see the breakdown of the categories here:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=53&eid=42185

rayiner•35m ago

The whole pie isn’t dollars reported on tax sheets. It’s Gross Domestic Income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_income.

nine_k•37m ago

Most income gets reinvested; the goal of modern large corporate accounting is to show a huge income, growth of sales, and near-zero profits. I suppose that the large revenues are also at least partly due to financial engineering, through structuring of subsidiaries, etc. Hence wages, which are real costs, look smaller compared to the large amounts of money sloshing around as huge revenues.

lotrg•33m ago

> no narrative attached

That's just a style choice; like using "unalived" to mean the same physical state as "dead"

Muricans love to launder their willful and feigned ignorance behind made up terms to appear objective

It's still the same human story behind the words; a minority hordes all the loot and pays goons to shoot hungry people

tjwebbnorfolk•19m ago

ok comrade

lotrg•11m ago

Oh no fellow American; I am 100% behind our norm of not having to concern myself with your having food, shelter, or healthcare

Don't mistake my point for giving a fuck that you, of all people, do not end up living in box behind a McDonald's; I don't care, text on a screen. :)

I just prefer brevity and absolute candor not empty platitudes and pointless circumlocution

beebmam•56m ago

Does this include income like RSUs?

JumpCrisscross•50m ago

> Does this include income like RSUs?

Yes [1].

[1] https://www.bea.gov/help/glossary/wages-and-salaries

zetazzed•43m ago

One major element in this is the rise of earnings from pass-through income. Self-employed or nearly self-employed individuals who would have been counted as employees of their small businesses 30+ years ago increasingly take "profits" from their business rather than "wages," even though they are the same thing. The "profits" get tax advantages. This makes labor share decline despite dentists, consultants, etc. still doing the same amount of work and taking home the same pretax income. See: https://www.ericzwick.com/labshare/labshare.pdf

forgetfreeman•36m ago

Is it though? Self-employed individuals who've set up an umbrella business entity aren't particularly common.

WarOnPrivacy•33m ago

> Self-employed individuals who've set up an umbrella business entity aren't particularly common.

I've serviced a lot of small businesses over 35yr of IT (typically deep into operations) and I've never come across it.

knappe•29m ago

At the center of their story is a quiet revolution in the American economy: the rise of a particular kind of private business. A few decades ago, these businesses collectively made far less money than Corporate America. But by 2011, they were generating more income than all traditional U.S. corporations combined — and accounting for most of the rise in the share of income flowing to the top "one percent."

Over the previous few decades, this sort of private business had — quite privately — taken over the American business world. In 1980, pass-through businesses generated about one-fifth of all U.S. business income. By 2011, they generated more than half. Move over, Corporate America. Hello, Pass-Through America!

https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2026/09/14/g-s1-14...

resters•36m ago

<scarcasm>Wait till millions of robotaxis hit the streets, the graph will crater!</sarcasm>

v3ai•12m ago

what happened in 1971 . com

Show HN: TitleArt – Make text like it's 1997

PaperPilot – Zero-Cloud, Pure-Rust PDF Engine with WASM and MCP

Dolly Parton's Imagination Library

Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office

Show HN: A Truly Modular Keyboard

Microsoft Decision-1: 9B Qwen Model Launch Explained

Overgrown, when plants invade your abandoned tabs

Learning to Be Me (1990) [pdf]

Attention Is Not What You Need (2025)

Lula wins election after final votes tallied

The Fall of Scientific American

IBM CEO says open weight models are now good and cheap on-prem

F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS

Why I Am a Programmer

The State of Context Engineering

What goes into making an animated film?

Iron Age salt-mining complex found beneath Hallstatt in Austria

Steal My Bitcoin CTF PoC

Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category

Show HN: Proc-CLI – An agent-friendly CLI tool for process and port management

Who Cares Whether Academics Use AI to Write?

iPhone Duo Teardown

Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers

A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis

Show HN: ADRs for AI – Deliberation records for human–AI work, versioned in Git

We should be more ambitious with the software we build

OpenAI and Anthropic cut their LLM prices by up to 80% within a few months. Why?

Making the Buddha Head from Merv Whole Again

Retired decorator's Pokémon cards sell for £1.5M

Where the Romans Fought (interactive map)