How to Get Rich in America

Kyla Scanlon's long-form essay on why the American economy now rewards ownership over effort, and what that shift does to people's relationship with work, wealth, democracy, and the future. It opens with her own habit of "pattern-matching" — mirroring accents and mannerisms to navigate unfamiliar rooms — and uses that as the master metaphor for a nation reading the economy's incentives and optimizing to them.

Central Thesis

The economy has reorganized around asset holders. Labor's share of economic output fell from ~58% in 1980 to ~51% today, while corporate profits rose from 7% to 11.7%. The result: wealth begets wealth through capital gains, and the only reliable answer to "how do you get rich?" is nonwage income — mostly stocks. When a normal life stops being purchasable through work, people stop treating work as the path and start chasing windfalls (crypto, meme stocks, sports betting, passive-income courses), producing a culture of financial nihilism and blurred gambling/investing.

Supporting Threads

• Demographics — Boomers hold 74% of US wealth (up from ~50% in 1989); those under 40 hold 6.6% (down from 11%). Home prices, propped by low fixed-rate mortgages, function as a retirement mechanism that "can never go down." Fernández-Villaverde: much of America's anger at corporate profits is a worker-retiree conflict in disguise.
• The AI wealth effect — AI is the newest, most visible installment: asset holders get rich off a technology that threatens to displace work, while data-center construction outlays hit ~$70B annually even as outlays on homes and hospitals fell $100B.
• Illegibility and kludgeocracy — Steven Teles's "kludgeocracy" and Annie Lowrey's "time tax" name the opacity of systems (healthcare billing, Fed forward guidance) that makes people retreat inward to domains where input and output still correlate: portfolios, supplement stacks, personal brands.
• Voice, resignation, exit — Hirschman's exit/voice/loyalty applied to ANES data: in 2020 the "typical American respondent" became an angry voter — someone who votes while believing their vote changes nothing — while the under-35 "resigned" (exit) share hit 23% in 2024. The young want to participate but find no legible path.

Key Figures

• Labor share: ~58% (1980) → ~51% (late 2024); corporate profits 7% → 11.7%.
• ~$8,000–$12,000/year lost per worker from the labor-share shift.
• 42% of top-1% nonwage income is capital gains; median American earns ~$3,000/year nonwage vs ~$37K wages.
• 1,200 new millionaires/day in the US through 2025; financial assets = ~80% of gross wealth.
• 73% say they're "doing okay or living comfortably" but only 26% rate the national economy good/excellent.

Takeaways

Scanlon's reframe: "Mood is downstream of the environment, and the environment can be changed." People are not lazy or irrational — they are pattern-matching a changed incentive structure with well-calibrated accuracy. The essay's throughline is that everything (the tax code, the stock market, the housing market, the app design of Robinhood) is "incentive structures, all the way down."