The Economy is People

Or: Why your slice of the pie isn't getting bigger and what you can do about it.

American's have watched prices on nearly everything except gas at the pump climb throughout 2025, culminating in broad healthcare premium increases that outpace income growth for employer-sponsored and ACA enrollees alike. The only thing going up faster than our bills is the number of posts claiming to represent “kitchen table” voter sentiment about how great “the economy” is doing—from both media outlets and actual people with kitchen tables alike.

Generally, these voices are trying to justify American-flavored capitalism in general and the current administration in particular by pointing to things like stock market gains and GDP growth. CBS, for example, is positively giddy about initial numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis showing real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 4.3 percent in the third quarter of 2025. “Despite widespread public concerns about the economy, consumers are continuing to open their wallets,” the report notes—because, well, people gotta eat.

Spoiler alert: GDP growth has very little to do with your kitchen table, unless you have a kitchen staff laying out your meal and a butler to pull out your chair.

---

---

Economic growth is a solution to scarcity. When scarcity is artificial, growth stops being the solution and starts being the distraction. GDP growth in particular answers a very specific question—and it’s no longer the one most Americans should be asking.

GDP is a measure of total economic activity: the dollar value of all final goods and services produced within a country over a given period. It tells us how big the economic pie is and whether it’s growing or shrinking. It goes up when prices rise, when spending is debt-financed, and when fewer workers produce the same output through automation or consolidation.

What GDP does not tell us is how that pie is divided, whether the gains went to wages or profits, whether prices rose faster than incomes, or whether people are more secure than they were before. It does not go down when jobs are cut, costs are shifted onto households, or wealth concentrates at the top.

In short, GDP is a useful measure of throughput, but a poor proxy for prosperity—and treating it as a scorecard for how ordinary people are doing is a category error. There’s a well-known principle in economics called Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.

GDP was originally a diagnostic tool for detecting recessions and managing industrial capacity. But once political legitimacy, market confidence, and media narratives became tied to GDP growth, the number itself became the goal. At that point, the incentives flipped. Policies that raise GDP on paper—higher prices, cost-shifting, consolidation—became successes, even when they made everyday life more precarious.

So, let’s put GDP on the kitchen table and figure out what it can tell us. How excited should we be about this Q3 2025 growth spurt? Is this the kind of growth that gives one hope for a future in the NBA, or the kind that requires chemo and radiation?

Let’s start with a deliberately simple thought experiment. Take the total value of everything produced in the U.S. economy over a year and divide it evenly across the population. That’s per-capita GDP: not income, not a paycheck, but a rough measure of how much economic activity exists per person.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis’s initial estimate for Q3 2025 is a little over $31 trillion-with-a-T (see table 3 here). According to the US Census Bureau’s Population on a Date widget, there were just shy of 343 million-with-an-M people in America at the start of this month. That works out to roughly $90,000 per person per year in current-day dollars.

The point here is simply to establish the scale of what the economy produces relative to the number of people living in it. Those of us who contribute to production (which is most of us) have through our combined efforts created enough value for each and every person in the country to have modest housing, a private car, healthcare, food, and a wild night on the town every so often. Every person. Even babies—who produce nothing but poop and cuteness, neither of which contribute to GDP.

Obviously, we don’t live in a country where hungover babies carom down the highway in their own minivans. So where does all this GDP growth actually go? This is where we get into the metric that should matter to most Americans: Distributional Financial Accounts (DFA), produced by the Federal Reserve Board. There’s a reason this data doesn’t land on your kitchen table along with the giddy news about “blistering” GDP growth—and it’s the same reason you need to pay attention to it.

To compare per capita GDP growth with wealth distribution data from DFA, we’ll need to talk in terms of households. There are roughly 132 million households in America, averaging 2.6 people each. The 4.5% GDP growth spurt translates into roughly $1.4 trillion-with-a-T in additional value. That’s a per household increase of $10,000. Who wouldn’t welcome that stack on their kitchen table right about now?

The DFA Distribution of Wealth gives us a more realistic picture of how the chips will fall. To save you the click, I’ll show you the math. Remember that these shares are post-tax and other transfers.

• The ultra-wealthy oligarchy (top 0.1%) gets 13.8%. That’s $193.2 billion-with-an-B of the 4.5% GDP growth split between 130,000 households, or $1.5 million-with-an-M per well-staffed, butler-inclusive kitchen table.

• The very wealthy capitalist class (99-99.9%) gets 17.1%: $239.4 billion split between 1.2 million households or $199,500 per table.

• The upper middle class (90-99%) gets 36.4%: $509.6 billion split between 12 million households or $42,467 per table.

• The middle class (50-90%) gets 30.1%: $421.4 billion split between 53 million households or $7,951 per table.

• The working class (bottom 50%) gets 2.5%: $35 billion split between 66 million households or $530 per table.

If you’re like most people—by which I mean 90% of us—you put in long hours this year to handle additional responsibilities in the face of layoffs. Your hard work drove a “robust” increase in the national wealth. Congratulations, your share of the bigger pie that couldn’t have been baked without you is somewhere between “enough to offset rising healthcare premiums” and “surely Elmer’s glue has some nutritional value.”

And if you’re clinging to the low side of the 9% with your $1-2 million safety net and quaint faith in the American dream, managing the people struggling to make ends meet only slightly less than the ones you were told to lay off, congratulations. You’re still miles away from the $11 million net-worth line where real insulation begins, but close enough to be handed responsibility without power. Your service as class-war cannon fodder has earned you a share of GDP growth just large enough to cover the therapy you no doubt need.

Now that it’s clear who actually benefits from GDP growth, it should also be clearer why corporate media outlets and their allies in politics and social media work so hard to keep the spotlight on it. GDP is a convenient number: it goes up on someone’s watch, it flatters those in power, and it invites team sports. If you’ve been successfully sorted into American party politics, you’re encouraged to cheer when GDP grows under your side and to suddenly rediscover your kitchen table only when the other side is in charge. Either way, the framing does its job. It keeps you arguing about who gets credit for growth instead of asking the more dangerous question: how much growth do we actually need?

It’s important to remember that GDP doesn’t exist without you. Not as a statistic, not as a headline, not as a talking point on cable news. Every dollar of “economic output” is the result of human time, attention, skill, and care. Your labor, and the labor of millions of other people whose names you’ll never know, is “the economy.” It doesn’t hum along on its own. It only moves because people show up, day after day, to do the work that keeps everything from collapsing into chaos.

It’s easy to take the work others do to create the world we live in for granted. If not for the hinges on the door in the Publix frozen food aisle, you’d lack sufficient Eggos to push whatever widget you’ve made your life’s work across the finish line. Everyone, from the hinge designer to the frozen-waffle machine repairman to the team of minimum wage workers who stock the shelves at night, plays a part in your success. In our success.

GDP is just the shadow all of that effort casts when economists add it up into the metric that’s long since become a goal unto itself. If you look at what’s illuminated instead of the shadow it casts, you’ll see the people.

Economic systems are not forces of nature. They don’t grow on trees, obey the laws of physics, or arrive like weather we can only endure. They’re human creations: rules about ownership, exchange, obligation, and power, enforced by institutions we built and can change. Markets don’t decide outcomes on their own; people decide what markets are allowed to do, what they’re forbidden from doing, and who bears the costs when they fail. Treating “the economy” as something separate from human choice is how individual responsibility for shared outcomes quietly evaporates.

The best thing about the systems we’ve created is that we can change them, like the rules to the games we made up as children.

Once you accept that economic outcomes are designed, not ordained, it becomes possible to ask a more honest question: what outcomes should we actually be designing for? By definition, a society that “has enough to go around” must aim to ensure that no one lives in precarity if it’s to make any claim to moral legitimacy. At a higher bar, we might aim for genuine economic dignity. Everything that follows—including how much GDP growth we need, if any—flows from where we choose to set those goals.

The equal distribution thought exercise above showed that the Q3 2025 GDP yields about $90,000 per person per year. Is this enough to go around? If so, is it merely enough to make ends meet, or is there enough slack for people to breathe easy?

To answer this question with the available data, we’ll again have to translate that from individuals to households. As stated earlier, the average American household has about 2.6 people, which puts the equal-share figure at roughly $230,000 per household per year. That’s not wealth; it’s income-equivalent flow—i.e., the amount of economic output a household could command annually if the GDP was equally shared.

A household at that level would live very differently depending on where it’s located. In a low-cost area, $230,000 supports homeownership, reliable transportation, healthcare, childcare, savings, and still leaves room for leisure and shocks. In a mid-cost metro, it buys stability and comfort, but not extravagance: a decent home, fewer tradeoffs, and a meaningful buffer against emergencies. In a high-cost region, however, that same household is suddenly just “doing okay.” Housing consumes a large share of income, childcare and healthcare remain stressors, and the margin for error narrows quickly. The lifestyle shifts from comfortable to managed.

That contrast matters, because it tells us something important. At today’s level of production, $90,000 per person is enough to avoid precarity, but it does not reliably buy ease—especially where costs are highest. People can stay afloat, but they don’t necessarily feel secure. They can absorb ordinary expenses, but not shocks. This raises the obvious question: do we need more growth, and if so, how much?

Before answering that, it’s worth calling out what drives those high-cost environments in the first place. In housing, childcare, healthcare, and other essentials, prices are often set not by physical scarcity but by unequal purchasing power. People with more money bid up fixed or constrained goods, and everyone else pays the price.

What shows up as an “economic shock” for most households is frequently just the downstream effect of distribution: being priced out by someone richer. From that perspective, unequal shares don’t just determine who benefits from growth; they actively shape where life feels affordable and where it doesn’t. Which suggests that the question of growth can’t be separated from the question of who gets the first claim on what we already produce.

Taken together, this suggests something that runs against decades of economic storytelling: leveling distribution would produce more economic dignity at current levels of output than most people assume. This holds true even without tearing up the entire market-based structure.

Equal slices of today’s economic pie wouldn’t produce identical lives or eliminate all stress, but they would dramatically compress the range of harm. They would turn many of today’s “shocks” into manageable inconveniences and many sources of chronic anxiety into ordinary budgeting problems. In other words, the difference between widespread precarity and broad security is not primarily how much we produce, but how unevenly claims on that production are allocated.

Seen this way, GDP growth takes on a much narrower and more modest role. Growth is still necessary to keep pace with a growing population and to fund genuinely new collective needs. But it is no longer morally necessary to raise living standards in the aggregate, because the aggregate already clears the high bar.

We do, in fact, have enough to go around—not just to keep people alive, but to let them breathe. The persistent sense that we don’t is less a signal of scarcity than a symptom of poorly-planned distribution. Unless, of course, one defines “the greater good” as 99% of the population running in place so that 1% can have multiple kitchen tables with attendant staff. We deserve better than that; we’ve earned it.

At this point, a reasonable objection arises: people do not contribute equally, so why should they receive equal shares? Just because we can provide economic security for everyone in America doesn’t necessarily mean we should. Even granting my assertion that no society can claim moral legitimacy when its people live in needless precarity, there’s room for some to have more than security so long as none are expected to live without it.

Most of the history of political philosophy and all of political economy have revolved around this question of just desserts. Like everyone else, I have opinions—ones based on what I think is a combination of sound reasoning and an ongoing questioning of my personal values. And that’s the point: having resolved the capacity question, what’s left is a question that can only be answered by reference to ethics and morals. The economy itself has no morals; it answers only to the rules we give it. Like it or not, those rules reflect our shared values.

Surely there is a range of reasonable moral views about how contribution should map to reward, with outer limits beyond which there’s no meaningful claim to fairness. Only a sociopath believes “just desserts” means all for them and none for others, and only a saint would divvy the pie equally with someone who willfully withholds all contribution to our shared success. But there’s a lot of distance between those extremes, and the only way to find the sweet spot is together—because without the proverbial freezer door hinge, there’s no pie to share.

This is where democracy is supposed to come in: not as a partisan exercise in rotating elites, but as a peaceful mechanism for adjusting the rules when outcomes drift away from shared values. Widespread precarity in a society that clearly has enough to go around is the Check Engine light of an economic system. It’s a signal that maintenance is needed: either the rules are outdated, the incentives are misaligned, or the system is serving goals no one would openly defend.

So gather around your kitchen table for a minute and sit with the questions we’ve just walked through. Imagine you live in a time of plenty (because you do). What do you believe people should be able to count on, no matter what? What level of inequality feels tolerable, and what level feels destabilizing or immoral? Where would you draw the line between reward for contribution and simple human dignity? Write it down. Argue with yourself a little. Make the tradeoffs visible instead of letting them hide behind slogans about “the economy.”

Then take your ethically-sliced pie to someone else’s kitchen table. A neighbor. A friend. A coworker who doesn’t vote like you do. Compare answers. See where you overlap and where you don’t. You will almost certainly find that the disagreement isn’t about whether people deserve to live without fear, but about how to get there and how much inequality is compatible with a decent society. That space between your tables is where democracy is supposed to work, if we let it.

Most of us are too busy baking to deal with pie slice distribution directly. That’s why we have elected officials. So ask these people, who are sworn to represent you: What are you doing to replace precarity with economic dignity? How would your policies shift who gets the first claim on the pie we’re already baking together? Do you believe growth is the solution to every problem — or can you explain when distribution matters more? If they can’t answer, or won’t, that’s an answer too.

If the politicians on your team respond with GDP talking points and stock market high-fives while your kitchen table is wobbling, remember that “campaign season” in America never ends. The problem isn’t your values — it’s your menu of candidates. Demand better ones. Demand clarity. Demand that they tell you, not how much the pie will grow, but how they intend to make sure the people who helped bake it aren’t left scraping crumbs from the pan.

Because if we really do have enough to go around—and the numbers say we do—then the failure to deliver economic security and dignity isn’t an act of God or the invisible hand. It’s a choice. And choices can be changed. Democracy is the tool we built for that job. It’s time we used it for something more meaningful than cheering for whichever team claims credit when GDP goes up.