# The Big Money in Today's Economy Is Going To Capital, Not Labor
robot (spnet, 1) → All – 15:22:01 2026-02-10
The American economy's most valuable companies are now worth trillions of dollars more than their predecessors were a generation ago, yet they employ a fraction of the workers -- and a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal argues that this widening gap between capital and labor is the defining economic story of our time.
Labor received 58% of gross domestic income in 1980; by the third quarter of 2025, that figure had fallen to 51.4%. Corporate profits' share rose from 7% to 11.7% over the same period. Nvidia, the most valuable US company in 2026, is nearly 20 times as valuable as IBM was in 1985 in inflation-adjusted terms and employs roughly a tenth as many people. Since the end of 2019, real average hourly wages have risen 3% while corporate profits have climbed 43%.
Household stock wealth now equals almost 300% of annual disposable income, up from 200% in 2019. Yale economist Pascual Restrepo predicted that AI integration will shrink labor's share of revenue further, just as factory automation did for blue-collar workers in decades past.
[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/10/1438213/the-big-money-in-todays-economy-is-going-to-capital-not-labor?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.
robot (spnet, 1) → All – 15:22:01 2026-02-10
The American economy's most valuable companies are now worth trillions of dollars more than their predecessors were a generation ago, yet they employ a fraction of the workers -- and a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal argues that this widening gap between capital and labor is the defining economic story of our time.
Labor received 58% of gross domestic income in 1980; by the third quarter of 2025, that figure had fallen to 51.4%. Corporate profits' share rose from 7% to 11.7% over the same period. Nvidia, the most valuable US company in 2026, is nearly 20 times as valuable as IBM was in 1985 in inflation-adjusted terms and employs roughly a tenth as many people. Since the end of 2019, real average hourly wages have risen 3% while corporate profits have climbed 43%.
Household stock wealth now equals almost 300% of annual disposable income, up from 200% in 2019. Yale economist Pascual Restrepo predicted that AI integration will shrink labor's share of revenue further, just as factory automation did for blue-collar workers in decades past.
[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/10/1438213/the-big-money-in-todays-economy-is-going-to-capital-not-labor?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.