The economists celebrating America’s boom are telling your boss’s story, not yours.
That is the only honest response to the analysis this week framing the American economy as a model of resilience—“the cleanest shirt in a very filthy laundry,” one economist called it. Capital expenditure at 13.9 percent of GDP. Annualized growth hovering around two percent. One hundred seventy-two thousand jobs added in May, smashing expectations. The shale revolution, the story goes, freed the United States from the energy shocks that used to break the economy.
The number the story also carried, four paragraphs from the end, was 4.2 percent. Consumer prices in May were 4.2 percent higher than a year earlier, up from 3.8 percent in April. The fastest pace in three years.
Here is what 4.2 percent looks like at a kitchen table in Fishtown on a Tuesday night. It looks like the grocery receipt for a family of four that crept from $145 to $160 to $185 over three years while the economists argued about whether inflation was transitory. It looks like the daycare invoice that was $2,400 a month last year and is $2,520 this year, because the daycare has a rent bill too, and the daycare is not a public utility, it is a business whose costs also rose 4.2 percent. It looks like the electric bill that now requires a mental calculation before you run the dishwasher. It looks like the gas pump where the shale revolution that “fundamentally altered America’s exposure to energy shocks” has not produced a number that makes filling the tank feel like anything other than a small robbery.
The economists celebrating a boom that American firms have absorbed by investing harder—the CapEx surge framed as resilience—are measuring capital’s experience of the economy. CapEx is up because firms responded to tariff pressure by investing in automation and supply-chain restructuring, not by raising wages. That 13.9 percent of GDP going to capital expenditure does not show up at the kitchen table. It is flowing into machines, software, and logistics networks that make firms more productive while cutting the number of workers they need. Productivity gains are real, and productivity gains at the household level mean you are doing more with less while your employer counts it as efficiency. The 172,000 jobs added in May are real, and the Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker has median wage growth at 3.5 percent—which means that against 4.2 percent inflation, the median worker took a pay cut in May and the business press called it a jobs boom. Workers in the bottom quartile saw real wage gains of just 0.7 percent in the year through May. A rounding error after the productivity surge. The share of that productivity flowing to labor is down. That is not resilience. That is extraction with a press release.
The Penn Wharton Budget Model has measured something the economists did not include in their analysis: the bottom 90 percent of American households faced inflation roughly one hundred basis points higher than the top 5 percent in 2021—6.9 percent versus 6.0 percent. The Atlanta Fed’s sticky-price index—the stuff that does not change much, the rent and the insurance and the childcare—was running at 3.0 percent year over year. The things you can cancel went back down. The things you cannot cancel did not.
That relentless math is the engine of the exhaustion Anne Helen Petersen captures in Can’t Even—she wrote that millennial burnout “isn’t a personal problem” and “will not be cured” by productivity apps. The economy the business press is celebrating is the economy that produces the burnout. The CapEx investment that offsets tariff costs is the CapEx investment that automates the next job. The productivity gains that keep GDP growing are the productivity gains that require each remaining worker to absorb the output of the worker who was not replaced. The resilience the economists are measuring is capital’s resilience. The exhaustion they are not measuring is yours.
That is the clean‑shirt narrative applied to human beings: our precarity is not a market failure; it is a cultural preference. We are just more “solutions‑oriented.” But the risk being celebrated—the risk of financing a business with stock instead of a bank loan, the risk of betting a retirement on a volatile market—is not the risk a family faces when they cannot pay the daycare bill. It is not the risk of a medical emergency with a deductible that costs more than a month’s take‑home pay. It is not the risk of a rent increase that forces a move to a worse school district. Those are not risks any family chooses. They are risks a system imposes while calling itself dynamic. In much of Europe, companies rely on bank loans, and workers’ pensions are tied to guaranteed insurance contracts. That model gets dismissed as risk‑averse. But that “aversion” means families do not lose their retirement when a hedge fund bets wrong, and a small business does not collapse because a venture capital partner demands a pivot to the latest AI hype. Stability is not a design flaw; it is a feature that American policy actively dismantles.
Rebecca Christie, a Brussels fellow quoted in the analysis, said something that should have been the headline: “If you’re struggling, you are really going to have a hard time because the labour market is not adding piles of new jobs, things are getting more expensive, many cities have housing crises.” She said this in the same analysis that called the American economy robust. Both things are true. They are not true about the same people.
The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies has documented that half of all American renter households—22.6 million households—are cost-burdened, paying more than 30 percent of their income for housing. Twelve point one million are severely cost-burdened, paying more than half. Middle-income renters making between $45,000 and $75,000 saw their cost-burdened share climb past 45 percent by 2023, and they are the fastest-growing burden cohort. This is the cohort the “resilient economy” is supposed to be serving.
Pamela Druckerman wrote about raising children in France, where the state funds year-long maternity leave, subsidized crèches, free maternelle from age three, and universal pediatric coverage. The French economy the business press calls sclerotic is the economy where a mother with two children under five does not spend $2,520 a month on daycare. The American economy the business press calls dynamic is the economy where she does, and where the economists celebrating the GDP numbers have not run the math on what $2,520 means when your combined net income after taxes is $8,800 and you are already carrying a mortgage at 7 percent on a house you could only afford because your husband’s grandmother died.
That math is $6,280. That is what is left after childcare from a combined net income of $8,800. Six thousand two hundred and eighty dollars for the mortgage, the utilities, the groceries that now cost $185 a week instead of $145, the car insurance, the student loans, the co-pays, the gas, and everything else the economists are not counting when they call the economy strong. Wall Street hit records this spring while the inflation number was climbing toward the fastest pace in three years. Both of those things happened in the same economy. They did not happen to the same people.
I should be specific about whose math this is. I have the rowhouse because David’s grandmother’s estate covered the down payment. I have the two incomes because we both finished college—his parents helped, mine helped more than they could afford. The privileges are real. The math still does not close. For the family without the grandmother’s estate or the college-educated parents or the two professional incomes, it closes even less. The economists calling this resilience are not running that version of the spreadsheet.
Taylor Swift’s “You’re On Your Own, Kid” opens with a speaker who waits for permission, for rescue, for the system to notice her, and arrives at the recognition that no one is coming. The title line is the American care infrastructure’s mission statement. The economy grew two percent. The shale revolution freed us from energy dependence. CapEx is at 13.9 percent of GDP. And if you are a mother with two children in a rowhouse in Fishtown, paying $2,520 a month for childcare and $1,900 a month for a mortgage at 7 percent interest, what the economy’s resilience means to you is that the lights are on and the math does not close and no one is coming to fix it. The friendship bracelets she puts on at the end of the song—the lateral safety net of the women around her—are the group text with the other mothers comparing daycare invoices at eleven at night. It is not nothing. It is not policy.
Pope Leo XIII wrote in Rerum Novarum in 1891 that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. He was writing about industrial laborers in European factories whose household budgets did not close. He could have been writing about the median American household in 2026, where two professional incomes support a family of four at a standard of living one income supported for a family of three a generation ago. The economists call the arrangement resilient. It is not. It is the household absorbing the cost the GDP refuses to count.
Every other wealthy country has figured out what a resilient