can walk away, negotiate a better one. if the economy is humming along, credit where credit is due, the economy is doing great, you should be able to negotiate a higher wage. that s not happening now. the problem is we re used to talking about the economy is a cyclical way. when we re up on the cycle, good things happen. the fact that that wage growth you re talking about is not happening, we re still at 2.7%, which is fine, but it s not where it was in the last several cycles. what that means is we re talking about a structural problem. this is a deeper problem that is embedded in the u.s. economy. it has to do with the way employers can negotiate with their employees. it has to do with noncompete contracts. noncompete contracts for fast food employees. for fast food employees. it has to do i remember that, my time at mcdonald s when i was a kid. nor my time scooping ice cream. towns where there s only a single employer. so these are problems that you cannot fix by goosing t
and we ve grown faster and produced more innovation than other economies have. so when we talk about spending more money in order to increase consumption in the short run, that money has to come from somewhere and it largely comes from income that would otherwise be saved and invested for equity. that surplus of capital sitting on the sideline is short-term capital that will not underwrite the growth of the economy. joe s work is all about equity, the lack of equity amplifies the business cycle because when you fear that you re going to go bankrupt in a business cycle, you dial backwards, thinking if you had more equity, you wouldn t do that. okay. to the point, first of all, investment in the kind of risk taking kinds of things like software, rnd is really actually quite strong. the weakness in investment is not surprise, is in things like real estate because we