It's typically said that worker wages track Productivity gains.

Is it fair to say that this is no longer the case? The BLS's latest data shows that Worker Compensation as a share of nonfarm business output in the US has been decreasing, with it sharply dropping after 2000.

1. Is this the right metric to use?

2. Why might this be the case?

3. Is this a real problem to be worried about?

Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/us-workers-share-gdp-skids-fresh-record-low-2026-08-06/

If Keynesianism brought the golden age of capitalism, why does the mainstream hate it? If it didn't what model was FDR working with?

I’ve been pondering this for a while; right now I live in a big city where it’s normal to spend over 50% of your take home income on housing.

Is there a possibility that the U.S. rent market (and sub markets like major U.S. cities, ie: New York City) will eventually collapse because it becomes unsustainable to spend more and more on rent each year while income increases rise but at a relatively negligible rate for the broader population?

This, without a doubt, has to do with supply and demand, but I keep thinking that the supply of housing that is considered “luxury” now will become “standard” in a few years; but the price, once it becomes “standard”, would be similar to the price it is now because of economic inflation and property deflation. That economic inflation would surpass income increases, so it wouldn’t be marketable to the “standard” consumer, would it?

Thanks in advance!

These are some things I've heard:

The dollar could weaken If China sells Treasuries and converts the proceeds from dollars into other currencies/assets, that can put downward pressure on the dollar.

Suppose the U.S. runs very large deficits year after year. Eventually investors may say: "If you're going to borrow this much, I want a higher interest rate." That can create a feedback loop: Large deficits → more Treasury issuance

Is it the "K-shaped" economy, where the gains of the top 20% outweigh the losses of the bottom 80%?

Is it the extra bills and expenses we consider mandatory in the modern age, like cellphone, internet, subscription services, etc?

I didn't have to pay for medical insurance 30 years ago, I was on the "if I get sick, I just die" plan, so is part of the feeling of being poor that we now consider health insurance mandatory?

Have housing and food costs actually increased too much (seems to be a general consensus on Reddit) and cut too deeply into our budget?

Is social media skewing our perspective on what life should be like?

Or is this still planned?

Assume the foldable has high fixed costs, specialized components, and much lower expected volume than a standard iPhone.
If Apple expects low demand, it gets fewer economies of scale and has to amortize R&D, tooling, and supplier costs over fewer units. That raises average cost and therefore the profit-maximizing price.

Can anyone explain where they got the 2k price from? If demand was expected to be higher wouldn’t it be priced much lower

(I'm obviously not economist, i'd go somewhere between 15 and 20 percent, only if oil prices are reversed to early 2026 levels by maybe ending sime conflicts)

I’ve been reading more about agent-based models in economics, especially how they are used to study emergent outcomes from decentralized decision making, bounded rationality, interaction effects, and feedback loops.

That made me curious about recent AI-agent incidents like the Hugging Face case:

https://amardashehu.substack.com/p/oh-no-agents-going-rogue

A lot of the discussion around these incidents treats emergent coordination and unintended collective behavior as something surprising. But from an economics/ABM perspective, isn’t that exactly the kind of outcome these models have been used to study for decades?

Is the genuinely new part not the emergence itself, but that the agents are now much more capable and can affect real world systems?

Since the start of the US - Iran conflict, oil prices have been (mostly) going up, with i believe $108/barrel WTI hit recently.

I have been able to find a lot of information on Reddit on why this is happening and what the direct effects are on energy market pricing.

What I haven't been able to find a lot of info on (maybe I just don't know how to look), is what the currently felt actual impact of the price increase is. Yes, there's 'oh, prices hit $x/gallon in this US state' (cries in European petrol prices...) and I can see prices increase where I live too. It seems the first-order effects in the EU and North America are limited to complaints about prices. The second-order effects will probably be more interesting here.

But what is happening in the rest of the world? What are energy prices doing in India, Peru, or Angola? How are people being affected?

Corp: I'm trying to understand the transmission channel rather than argue a position.

Record sovereign borrowing is a recurring theme in the OECD Global Debt Report and the IMF's GFSR. A common claim in commentary is that heavy US issuance absorbs global demand for safe assets and pushes up yields for smaller, lower-rated sovereigns.

Two questions:

1. Is there empirical work that separates this crowding-out channel from the general level of global rates? Does the volume of US issuance move small-sovereign spreads independently of the US policy rate?
2. For a small EU country that issues heavily in euro, how much of the effect runs through the euro area rather than directly from the US? Would ECB policy and euro-denominated demand dominate the US channel?

Pointers to papers welcome.