Insecurity, Not Flexibility, Is America's Economic Engine

The American economy is resilient. It’s also subsidized by the insecurity of the people who make it run.

BBC correspondent Michelle Fleury recently asked why the US keeps outperforming its peers despite tariffs, energy shocks, and Middle East conflict. Her answer: flexible markets, rapid investment, abundant energy, and a culture of risk-tolerance. CapEx is running at 13.9% of GDP. Productivity is up. Employers added 172,000 jobs in May. American firms, hit with a tax on foreign components, didn’t fold — they stopped waiting for supply chains to return to normal and invested harder. The numbers are real.

I’ll go further than the article does. The shale revolution genuinely reduced America’s energy vulnerability — the global economy weathered the Hormuz closure with limited damage partly because of it. The dollar’s reserve-currency status gives American firms financing flexibility Europeans don’t have. CapEx at 13.9% of GDP in the teeth of a trade war is a number you don’t wave away. American business invests through shocks. That’s real, and it matters.

What the article never asks — what articles in this genre never ask — is where the gains go.

CapEx is 13.9% of GDP. Median weekly earnings for a non-union worker: about $1,174 (BLS, 2025). Productivity has roughly doubled since the 1970s. The typical paycheck has barely moved. Someone has been catching the difference. It isn’t the person operating the machine.

Near the bottom of Fleury’s piece sits a sentence doing more honest work than everything above it: “The US is a land of very high inequality.” In the article’s framing, that’s a caveat — something that might eventually erode the advantage. It’s not a caveat. It’s the subscription fee.

Here’s what flexibility actually means at a kitchen table. It means you can be fired by text. It means losing your job costs you your kid’s doctor, because health insurance rides on employment in this country and almost nowhere else in the rich world. It means the housing market in every major American city treats your rent as an asset class for someone who will never sleep in your apartment. It means the union that might negotiate a better deal covers roughly six percent of the private-sector workforce — down from about a third in the 1950s — because a series of laws, starting with Taft-Hartley in 1947, slowly made it legal to enjoy the benefits of a union contract without paying for one.

That’s the flexibility the article celebrates. It’s real. It’s also what happens when you remove the floor and call the fall “dynamism.”

The article’s sources attribute the American edge to “culture.” Americans are “very solutions-oriented,” “much more comfortable with taking a short-term risk in service of a long-term advantage.” Europe, by contrast, is “risk-averse.” This framing converts a policy choice into a personality trait. Americans aren’t risk-tolerant because they’re brave. They’re risk-exposed because they have no safety net. When the fall is fatal, “solutions-oriented” is just a polite word for scrambling.

Joe Brusuelas, the RSM economist quoted in the piece, calls the American economy “the cleanest shirt in a very filthy laundry.” Notice nobody asks who folded it.

Now — the alternative, because it already exists and has for decades. Denmark fires workers more easily than most American states. Genuinely. By law. Danish job protection is weaker than the European average. Employers can let people go with relatively little friction.

But when a Dane loses a job, the system catches her. Up to two years of most of her salary. Retraining. Placement services. The system protects the worker, not the job. A Dane will quit and start a company because failure means retraining, not the street. An American clings to a job she hates because losing it costs her family their doctor. Both economies are flexible. One is also humane.

Two countries struck oil. Norway built a sovereign wealth fund — now worth roughly two trillion dollars — that owns about 1.5% of every listed company on earth and mails the dividend to the future. Texas built a boom, a bust, and a bumper sticker. The difference wasn’t geology. It was the institution.

I hear the objection: the Nordic model can’t work here. Too big, too diverse, too federalized, too many centuries of racial division used to break working-class solidarity. I’ll concede the iceberg. The institutions underneath — high union density, organized employers willing to bargain as a bloc, a century of competent delivery that built social trust — took a hundred years to build. You can’t airlift Danish policy onto American soil and expect it to root. Policy is the tip. Institutions are the iceberg.

But some of those pieces already exist here. We just refuse to scale them.

In 2021, America ran a near-universal monthly child benefit. Child poverty fell 46% in a single year — from 9.7% to 5.2% — lifting roughly three million children above the line. We turned the policy on. Poverty fell by half. We turned the off. Poverty came back. That’s a controlled experiment we ran on ourselves. Then we abandoned it.

Alaska runs a sovereign wealth fund. North Dakota runs a state-owned bank that has been profitable every year since 1919. Forty-two million Americans are member-owners of rural electric cooperatives. A hundred and forty-five million belong to a credit union. These aren’t Scandinavian imports. They’re American institutions hiding in plain sight, in some of the reddest states in the country. We already do this. We just won’t say the word.

The American economy is resilient. Its people don’t have to be fragile. We’ve built the floor before — in Alaska, in North Dakota, in a single year when a child benefit cut poverty in half. The question isn’t whether the model works. It’s who the model works for.