From the editors: This is part 3 of a series on America's Broken Promise by Joe Maxwell. Joe Maxwell is the President of Farm Action Fund. In his final essay, he explains why young people no longer have the opportunities to build wealth like their parents and grandparents – and how to fix America's Broken Promise.
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In Part I of this series, I wrote about my dad and grandpa and the America they knew—an America where hard work didn't guarantee prosperity, but it gave ordinary people a reasonable path toward it.
They weren't promised wealth. They weren't promised that everyone would end up in the same place. What they had was an opportunity to work, take responsibility, build something of their own, and leave the next generation with a little more than they started with.
That was America's promise.
Work provided a path to prosperity.
For millions of Americans today, that path has become harder to find. The question is why.
Every worker is a seller
We usually think about working Americans as consumers. We talk about what they pay for groceries, gasoline, healthcare, rent, and everything else they need. But before workers can buy anything, they have to sell something.
The real question is the one we have been asking throughout this series: Do people have meaningful alternatives?
They sell their labor.
That makes the labor market a market like any other. Employers are buyers. Workers are sellers.
We understand this instinctively when we're talking about farmers. A cattle producer needs more than one packer bidding for their cattle. A grain farmer needs more than one elevator competing for their corn. Without competing buyers, a farmer may technically have the freedom to reject a bad price, but that freedom doesn't mean much if there is nowhere else to sell.
Why should we expect anything different for a worker?
The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission recognize this principle in their merger guidelines. Employers are buyers of labor, and workers are sellers. When competition among employers diminishes, the agencies warn, wages can fall or grow more slowly, benefits and working conditions can worsen, and workers can lose bargaining power.1
Economists call buyer power in labor markets monopsony. Most Americans have probably never used the word. But they understand the experience.
If you're a nurse in a rural community with one hospital, how many realistic buyers are there for your labor? If you work in a meatpacking town where one company operates the plant, where else do you take your skills?
You might technically be free to quit. But just as with the cattle producer who has only one buyer, the important question is:
Where else can you go?
When employers don't compete for workers
The poultry industry provides a real-world example. Poultry-processing workers slaughter, clean, cut, debone, and package the chicken and turkey that ends up in grocery stores and restaurants across America.
In 2022, the Justice Department sued Cargill, Sanderson Farms, Wayne Farms, and a compensation consulting firm, alleging that competing poultry processors had for years exchanged information about wages and benefits and collaborated on compensation decisions rather than independently competing for workers. The processors ultimately became subject to a federal consent decree requiring, among other things, restrictions on sharing competitively sensitive compensation information, antitrust monitoring, and a collective $84.8 million in restitution for poultry-processing workers harmed by the alleged conspiracy.2
Joe Maxwell
Read Part 1 of our America's Broken Promise series
Think about what was supposed to happen in that labor market. The workers were selling their labor. The processors were supposed to compete to buy it.
If one processor needed another shift filled, the capitalist response should have been straightforward: offer better pay, better benefits, better hours, or better working conditions and persuade workers to come work there. Instead, the processors worked together to ensure they all offered the same wages and benefits locking employees in with no options. . . something like that.
That's competition.
The same principle that applies to a cattle market applies to a labor market: sellers have greater economic power when buyers have to compete for what they are selling.
The freedom to say no
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has found this relationship across the broader economy. Using the near-complete universe of U.S. employment and wage data from 2002 through 2023, BLS found a significant negative association between employer concentration and wages. Its baseline estimate found that a 10 percent increase in employer concentration was associated with about a 0.3 percent decrease in average wages.3
That doesn't mean every large employer suppresses wages. It doesn't mean every merger harms workers. And declining employer competition does not explain everything that has happened to American wages.
Big isn't automatically bad.
The real question is the one we have been asking throughout this series: Do people have meaningful alternatives?
A worker may theoretically have hundreds of employers. But if the next comparable job is 80 miles away, requires moving the family, giving up childcare provided by grandparents, or abandoning skills built over a lifetime, those employers aren't necessarily meaningful alternatives.
Competition is one of capitalism's most important mechanisms
For a brief period after the pandemic, we got to see what happens when workers have more alternatives. The low-wage labor market became unusually tight. Employers needed workers. Research by economists David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew found that workers—particularly younger workers without college degrees—moved from lower-paying employers to better-paying jobs, and increased labor-market competition contributed to unusually rapid wage gains at the bottom of the wage distribution. They described it through the lens of a reinvigorated job ladder.4
Employers competed. Workers moved. Wages responded.
Competition worked.
America became more prosperous. Who shared in it?
America did not stop creating wealth. Workers became more productive. Businesses grew. Technology improved. Investors prospered. The American economy continued creating enormous amounts of wealth.
But something changed in how that prosperity was divided. In the second quarter of 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, labor's share of nonfarm business output—the portion flowing to workers through wages, benefits, and other compensation—fell to 52.8 percent, the lowest level in a series going back to 1947.5
At the same time, compensation at the top of corporate America has moved very differently from compensation for typical workers. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that CEOs at the 350 largest U.S. corporations received about 21 times the compensation of a typical worker in 1965. By 2025, that ratio was approximately 325 to one. From 1978 through 2025, EPI estimates inflation-adjusted CEO compensation increased about 1,316 percent, while typical-worker compensation increased about 28 percent.6
The point isn't that government should decide what a CEO is allowed to make. It shouldn't. Extraordinary talent, risk, innovation, and success can produce extraordinary rewards in a capitalist economy.
It is easy for one generation to look at the next and wonder why they haven't done what their parents did. Work hard. Save your money. Buy a home.
But those numbers raise an important question: How did an economy that became so much more productive and prosperous produce such dramatically different gains for the people at the top and the people doing the everyday work?
There isn't one answer. Technology matters. Globalization matters. Education and skills matter. Tax policy, declining unionization, changing industries, and many other forces matter. But competition matters too.
When employers have to compete aggressively for labor, workers have bargaining power. When workers have fewer realistic alternatives, some of that power shifts toward the buyer of their labor. For too long, government failed to give competition for workers the attention it deserved.
Predistribution before redistribution
That failure matters because America spends enormous political energy arguing about what government should do after prosperity has already been distributed. One side often calls for more taxes and government programs to redistribute income. The other argues that government should largely leave the market's distribution alone.
But both debates can skip an earlier question: Did government do its job protecting the competitive market that was supposed to distribute economic opportunity in the first place?
Consider a simple example. Suppose one employer can hire a worker for $20 an hour because that worker has few realistic alternatives. Government may then provide tax credits or other assistance to help that family make ends meet.
But suppose three employers are competing for the same worker. One offers $20, another $22, and another $25. The worker can choose $25.
Government didn't set the wage. Government didn't decide what the worker deserved. And government didn't have to make up the other $5 through a subsidy.
Competition did the bargaining.
That is the difference between trying to repair the outcome afterward and protecting the competitive conditions that help determine the outcome in the first place.
Economists and political economists sometimes call this idea predistribution: shaping market institutions and economic power so that opportunity and income are distributed before taxes and transfer programs come into play. The concept is commonly associated with Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker.7
Competition is one of capitalism's most important mechanisms for doing that.
This doesn't eliminate the need for a safety net. Children should not go hungry because their families are poor. Elderly Americans and people with disabilities should not be abandoned because they cannot fully participate in the labor market. And sometimes people who can work need help—education, training, childcare, healthcare, or simply a hand getting back onto the path toward independence.
A safety net catches people when they fall. A competitive economy should give working people somewhere to climb.
Government has a responsibility for both. But they are not the same responsibility.
Before we ask government to redistribute more of the prosperity America creates, we should ask whether government has done its job protecting the competitive conditions that give working people a fair opportunity to earn more of that prosperity for themselves.
Joe Maxwell
Read Part 2 of our America's Broken Promise series
Where did the ladder go?
Nowhere is the broken promise easier to see than housing. The American dream was never simply about having a roof overhead. Renting can be the right choice for many people and at many stages of life. But ownership has traditionally provided something more.
You worked. You earned a wage. You saved. You bought a modest home. You paid down the mortgage. You built equity. Over time, part of your labor was transformed into something you owned.
That ladder is becoming harder to climb.
Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that, assuming standard lending terms, only 23 percent of homes listed for sale in March 2026 were affordable to a household earning $75,000 or less. In March 2019, 49 percent were. The number of listings affordable to households earning under $75,000 had fallen by more than 60 percent.8
It is easy for one generation to look at the next and wonder why they haven't done what their parents did. Work hard. Save your money. Buy a home.
But what if they are working hard? What if they are being responsible? What if the problem isn't that they stopped climbing, but that the rungs of the ladder have moved farther apart?
In 2019, nearly half the homes listed for sale were affordable to a household earning $75,000 or less. Seven years later, fewer than one in four were.
The work ethic didn't disappear. The opportunity changed.
The National Association of Realtors reported that first-time buyers accounted for only 21 percent of recent homebuyers in its 2025 survey, the lowest share in its survey history. The median first-time buyer was 40 years old.9
That matters because ownership remains one of the principal ways American families build wealth. The Federal Reserve's 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances found that about 66 percent of families owned their homes. Among homeowners, median net housing wealth—the value of the home minus home-secured debt—was approximately $230,000.10
A renter pays for shelter. A homeowner also pays for shelter, taxes, insurance, maintenance, and interest. Homeownership isn't free, and it isn't appropriate for everyone.
But with every principal payment, the homeowner can also acquire something the renter does not:
ownership.
A competitive economy distributes economic power before government has to redistribute economic wealth.
And ownership can become equity. Equity can become financial independence. And financial independence is one of the ways work becomes prosperity.
For too many working families, the problem isn't that they refuse to work. They work. They pay rent. They buy groceries. They put gasoline in the car. They pay for childcare, insurance, healthcare, and everything else a family needs.
What they increasingly struggle to do is accumulate enough capital to make the transition from paying for a life to owning a piece of it.
work → wages → savings → ownership → equity → financial independence → prosperity
That ladder has become much harder to climb.
Restoring the promise
Government cannot promise everyone prosperity. It shouldn't try.
Capitalism doesn't promise equal outcomes. Some people will build enormously successful companies. Some will make investments that pay off. Some will develop skills that command extraordinary compensation. Some businesses will succeed while others fail.
That's not the broken promise. The promise is opportunity.
A fair opportunity for farmers to receive a competitive price for what they produce. For entrepreneurs to challenge established corporations. For consumers to take their business somewhere else. And for working people to have employers compete for the value of their labor.
Government failed for too long to adequately protect that competition. When competition weakens, economic power can concentrate, alternatives can disappear, and ordinary people can lose bargaining power.
That is why protecting competition isn't an attack on capitalism.
It is one of government's most important responsibilities in a capitalist economy.
In Part I, we saw that competition creates freedom because it gives people alternatives and therefore the ability to say no.
In Part II, we saw that competition creates discipline because high prices and extraordinary profits create an opportunity for others to enter, expand, and compete those profits away.
And here is the final piece.
Competition helps create prosperity by dispersing economic power broadly enough that the people doing the work have a meaningful opportunity to share in the wealth their work helps create.
A competitive economy distributes economic power before government has to redistribute economic wealth.
That doesn't guarantee prosperity. It gives people a fairer opportunity to earn it.
My dad and grandpa were never promised where they would end up. They were given a path and the opportunity to climb it.
That is the promise we need to restore: America's Promise.
© 2026 Joe Maxwell. All rights reserved.
- U.S. Department of Justice & Federal Trade Commission. (2023). Merger Guidelines, Guideline 10: When a merger involves competing buyers, the agencies examine whether it may substantially lessen competition for workers, creators, suppliers, or other providers. https://www.justice.gov/atr/merger-guidelines/applying-merger-guidelines/guideline-10© 2026 Joe Maxwell. All rights reserved.
- U.S. Department of Justice. (2022, July 25). Justice Department files lawsuit and proposed consent decrees to end long-running conspiracy to suppress worker pay at poultry processing plants and address deceptive abuses against poultry growers. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-files-lawsuit-and-proposed-consent-decrees-end-long-running-conspiracy; U.S. Department of Justice. (2025). U.S. v. Cargill Meat Solutions Corp., et al. https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/usv-cargill-meat-solutions-corp-et-al© 2026 Joe Maxwell. All rights reserved.
- Thompson, T. L. (2024, October 3). Measuring labor market concentration using the QCEW. Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/measuring-labor-market-concentration-using-the-qcew.htm
- Autor, D., Dube, A., & McGrew, A. (2024). The unexpected compression: Competition at work in the low wage labor market (NBER Working Paper No. 31010, rev. May 2024). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/papers/w31010
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2026, September 15). Labor share at its lowest level, 52.8 percent, in second quarter 2026. The Economics Daily. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2026/labor-share-at-its-lowest-level-52-8-percent-in-second-quarter-2026.htm© 2026 Joe Maxwell. All rights reserved.
- Economic Policy Institute. (2026). CEO pay surged in 2025: CEOs are paid 325 times as much as the typical worker. https://www.epi.org/blog/ceo-pay-surged-in-2025-ceos-are-paid-325-times-as-much-as-the-typical-worker/© 2026 Joe Maxwell. All rights reserved.
- Hacker, J. S. (2011). The institutional foundations of middle-class democracy. Policy Network, 6(5), 33–37. https://assets.website-files.com/64a8727f61fabfaa63b7b770/64aab85cf813ccbee57ce07f_hacker_pn.pdf
- Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. (2026). The State of the Nation’s Housing 2026 (p. 12). https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/state-nations-housing-2026© 2026 Joe Maxwell. All rights reserved.
- National Association of Realtors. (2025, November 4). First-time home buyer share falls to historic low of 21%, median age rises to 40. https://www.nar.realtor/press-releases/first-time-home-buyer-share-falls-to-historic-low-of-21-median-age-rises-to-40
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2026, October 9). Federal Reserve Board releases results of the 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances. https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/other20261009a.htm© 2026 Joe Maxwell. All rights reserved.
