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JW Justin Wolfers Justin Wolfers Professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of a widely used i...

“What we have right now is the United States is giving the largest share of our giant delightful pie to owners rather than workers than we've ever had at any point in our history.”

Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers · Money & Markets · November 2026

“What we have right now is the United States is giving the largest share of our giant delightful pie to owners rather than workers than we've ever had at any point in our history.” — Justin Wolfers, Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers

Context

A listener said stock gains let him absorb higher living costs. Wolfers uses a pie metaphor for GDP to explain that the share of national income going to owners rather than workers is at a record.

Transcript

Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers Around 21:02 into the episode
Justin Wolfers

…we Americans get together and we bake an economic pie. We call that pie GDP. Oh, wow, P ends in pie. Can you come up with a really good acronym, something, something pie for GDP? I'm in a Zachros, domestic pie, but giant delightful. Our giant delightful pie. Thank you. You're a lifesaver, Augusta.

Augusta Chapman

Anytime.

Justin Wolfers

…of whom Mark is one, and the smaller share goes to workers. We worry about that because most ownership is very concentrated among the very wealthy. Mark might describe himself, I think, as quite comfortable, but not quite a billionaire. But a lot of the money does go off to the billionaire class. Workers, much more equally distributed. Then the question was: do we expect this out? And so, what we have right now is the United States is giving the largest share of our giant delightful pie to owners rather than workers than we've ever had at any point in our history. And then, Augusta, your question, Mark's question, is that likely to continue? Do we see some reversal? It's a very hard question. One, I want to bite on the politics and then I'll come back on the economics. You could say, is this issue going to change? And I would ask you, is any economic issue going to change? Which strikes me as one of the most important things coming out of last night. So…

Augusta Chapman

Civics 101. They don't make you take that as an part of the immigration test.

Justin Wolfers

Well, they do. And actually, now I'm going to sound like President Trump. I aced that test.

Augusta Chapman

Yeah, you probably know more about it than I do. Those tests are hard.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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