I’m sitting on the aft deck of a sailboat in a Florida resort marina, looking across the parking lot at a gas station sign. The numbers on that sign have become my personal Bloomberg terminal. Regular is pushing five dollars. Diesel is somewhere north of six and climbing. Down the dock, the fuel barge prices make those numbers look quaint. I just watched a 60-foot sportfisher take on 1,500 gallons at a per-gallon price that would make a trucker weep, and nobody on that boat even glanced at the receipt.
The sailboat is 26 years old. I sold my house to buy it a decade ago for about $235,000, which was roughly half what a house in Florida cost then and about a third of what one costs now. The slip fees run six to eight thousand dollars for the season, which is what an HOA charges a homeowner for the privilege of being told what color to paint the front door. The boat is paid for. It costs about twenty grand a year to keep it floating, maintained, and ready to cross the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas. That’s less than a lot of people spend on a full-time RV. And unlike a house, a boat is not an asset. It depreciates every year toward the scrap value of its fiberglass. Nobody is building equity sitting where I’m sitting. I’m not rich. I’m a guy on a paid-off boat watching the gas station sign change and wondering who exactly the economy is working for.
A few days ago the Census Bureau announced that median household income hit $87,460 in 2025. Record high. Highest since they started counting in 1967. The press release went out, the financial pages ran their headlines, and the economy took a victory lap around a number that describes almost nobody I know.
I want to talk about that number. I want to talk about why it’s a lie wrapped in accurate math. And I want to do it from the fuel dock, because the fuel dock is the only honest economist left in America.
The Diner Problem
Here’s a thought experiment that every statistics professor has used and every policymaker has ignored.
Five people sit at the counter of a diner somewhere in central Florida. A retail worker making $35,000. A delivery driver making $35,000. A mechanic pulling $45,000. A teacher at $60,000. A shift manager at $75,000.
The mode of this room, the single most common wage, is $35,000. Two people sit right there. The median, the exact middle person, is the mechanic at $45,000. The mean, the average, is $50,000. All three numbers are close enough to reality that you could use any of them to describe the diner and nobody would call you a liar.
Now a tech billionaire walks in for coffee. He makes $100 million a year. He’s just one guy. He orders black coffee and sits at the end of the counter.
The mode is still $35,000. The median nudges up to $52,500. The mean explodes to $16.7 million.
If a cable news anchor walks in behind the billionaire and announces that the average income in this diner is $16.7 million, she is telling the mathematical truth. She is also telling the most dangerous kind of lie, the kind with a source you can cite.
Not one of the original five people can suddenly afford to fill their gas tank without checking their bank balance first. The mean didn’t measure the room. It measured the distortion of the room. And every single time you hear the phrase “average American income” or “GDP per capita,” you are hearing the diner problem played at national scale with 340 million people and a few thousand billionaires dragging the number into the stratosphere.
The Mode Is the Everyman
Economists love the median. It’s their compromise candidate, the one they trot out when someone catches them using the mean. And the median is better. It’s the literal middle. Half above, half below. But the median still hides something critical: where the largest cluster of actual human beings sits on the income ladder.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not publish a modal wage. Think about that for a second. The single most common paycheck in the country, the number that describes more Americans than any other single figure, is not an official statistic. Nobody in Washington tracks it. Nobody in the financial press reports it. You have to back into it from occupational employment data and income distribution tables, and when you do, the number that falls out sits somewhere between $35,000 and $45,000 for individual workers.
Retail salespeople. Food prep workers. Warehouse staff. Home health aides. Office support. These are not edge cases. These are the largest occupational categories in the country by headcount. Millions of people clustered at the same pay grade because corporations benchmark entry-level and mid-level jobs to identical industry standards across entire sectors. The pile-up at the bottom of the income distribution isn’t a tail. It’s the body of the animal. The long tail runs the other direction, up through six figures and seven figures and eight, getting thinner and thinner and dragging the mean further and further from the ground.
The mode is where America actually lives. And nobody measures it.
When a politician says “middle class,” the number in his head is the mean. Somewhere around $70,000 to $80,000 household income. That’s the statistical middle of a country where a handful of people make more money in a quarter than most families will see in a lifetime. The mean middle class is a phantom. It’s the average of a room distorted by the billionaire at the end of the counter. The mode is where the actual middle-class lives, the income bracket where the largest number of working Americans cash their paychecks and try to make rent. It sits twenty to thirty thousand dollars below the mean. That gap is the difference between the country economists describe and the country people inhabit.
$87,460 and the Seven-Year Treadmill
That record median household income, $87,460, arrived on September 15, 2026, with all the fanfare of a genuine milestone. The Census Bureau was careful to note it was adjusted for inflation. Real gains. Actual purchasing power increase.
But read the fine print. The 2024 median was $85,210. The 2019 median, the last pre-pandemic peak, was $85,320. Those two numbers are statistically indistinguishable. Seven years of pandemic, supply chain collapse, political upheaval, and inflationary hell, and the median American household ended up exactly where it started. The 2025 bump to $87,460 is the first time in seven years the number moved in a direction you could feel.
And the bottom didn’t move at all. The Census data shows the top 10% of households climbing to $261,300. The bottom 10% actually declined. When the headline says “record high,” it’s measuring a number that got pulled upward by the people who were already winning.
The modal worker, the one making $35,000 to $45,000, didn’t get a record. That worker got seven years of running harder to stay in the same place while the price of gas doubled and the price of diesel nearly tripled and the grocery bill went up 30% and every piece of software and every car feature that used to come included started showing up as a monthly charge on the credit card.
The Parasitic Loss Economy
In mechanical engineering, there’s a concept called parasitic loss. It’s the energy a machine wastes just keeping itself running. Friction in the bearings. Heat from the exhaust. Resistance in the wires. None of it does useful work. It just burns fuel to exist.
The American consumer economy has been redesigned around parasitic loss. The car you buy in 2026 costs more than a first house cost in 1995, and it comes with the heated seats already installed, the navigation hardware already wired, the software already loaded. You can see the button on the touchscreen. Press it, and the car asks you to subscribe. Fifteen dollars a month for seats that warm up. Twenty dollars a month for maps. Thirty dollars a month for the parking camera to show you the guidelines.
None of this is optional in any meaningful sense. You already bought the hardware. You cannot buy a competing heated seat from across the street. The manufacturer built the tollbooth into the dashboard and charges you for driving through it.
GDP counts every one of those subscription payments as consumer spending. Positive economic activity. Proof of a resilient consumer. In reality, it’s a monthly wealth transfer from people who have already paid for a product to a corporation that has decided ownership is a legacy concept. You build zero equity. You gain zero asset value. You pay indefinitely for the privilege of using something you already physically possess.
When hundreds of millions of people pay hundreds of dollars a month in mandatory subscriptions, the GDP line goes up and the consumer’s bank account goes down. The machine is running. It’s just not going anywhere.
Cory Doctorow gave this pattern a name when he watched it eat the tech platforms: enshittification. The cycle runs the same way every time. A platform starts by being useful to the people who use it. Then it shifts value to the businesses that advertise on it. Then it extracts everything that’s left for shareholders. The product gets worse at every stage, but by the time the user notices, they’re locked in. Their photos are on the platform. Their contacts are on the platform. Their history is on the platform. Leaving costs more than staying, and the platform knows it.
What nobody talks about is that this cycle jumped the fence. It’s not just your search engine that got worse. It’s not just your social media feed filling up with ads disguised as posts. The entire American consumer economy runs on the enshittification cycle now, and the thing being degraded isn’t a product. It’s the material quality of a human life.
Your car got enshittified. It used to come with heated seats that worked when you bought them. Now they work when you subscribe. Your grocery store got enshittified. The same box of cereal costs 30% more and holds 15% less. Your insurance got enshittified. The premium went up, the deductible went up, and the coverage went down. Your rent got enshittified. The apartment is the same apartment your parents rented for $600 a month, and you pay $1,800 because a private equity firm bought the building and calculated exactly how much pain the tenant can absorb before moving becomes cheaper than staying.
Every one of those extractions registers as economic activity. The insurer’s revenue goes up. The landlord’s cash flow goes up. The automaker’s recurring revenue goes up. GDP goes up. And the modal worker, the person on the receiving end of every one of those extractions, watches their purchasing power go down while the economy they live in tells them they’ve never had it so good. That’s not parasitic loss anymore. That’s an extraction economy running on steroids, measuring its own health by how efficiently it drains the host.
The AI Float
About that GDP. The number everyone waves around, the 2% to 2.5% real growth that makes the United States look like the healthiest economy in the developed world. That kind of glad-handing is the reason I still drink bourbon.
Four companies, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta, are spending a combined $725 billion on capital expenditure in 2026. That is up 77% from the $410 billion they spent in 2025. The vast majority goes to AI data centers, GPU clusters, and power infrastructure. In some quarters, tech infrastructure spending has accounted for 35% to 40% of all U.S. GDP growth.
Here’s the trick. Amazon invests $200 million in an AI startup. That startup immediately hands $180 million of it to Microsoft to buy Azure compute time. Microsoft books the revenue. GPU makers book the chip sale. Construction companies book the data center contract. GDP goes up at every handoff. On paper, billions of dollars moved. In practice, the money circled a closed loop and came back to roughly where it started, minus some concrete and copper wire.
If you strip the Magnificent Seven out of the growth number, the economy that everyone else lives in, the one with the gas stations and the grocery stores and the mortgage payments, is growing at something close to 0.5%. Which is a polite way of saying it’s not growing at all. Which is exactly what it feels like when you’re standing at the pump watching the numbers spin.
The last time America saw this kind of infrastructure mania was 1999, when telecom companies spent billions laying fiber optic cable across the ocean floor. GDP went up while they dug the trenches. Then they realized nobody was going to pay enough to use the cables, and the stock market cratered, and the cables sat dark on the bottom of the Atlantic for a decade. The concrete was real. The steel was real. The GDP contribution was real. The economic value was not.
The Fuel Dock Economist
I live on a sailboat. I buy diesel at a marina. Marine diesel carries no road tax. Federal excise on highway diesel runs about 24 cents a gallon. Florida tacks on another 35 cents. Marine diesel should be 60 cents cheaper per gallon than what the truckers pay.
It isn’t. Marine diesel at my dock costs more. Sometimes a lot more. The state average for highway diesel in Florida just hit $6.31, an all-time record. At the marina? Add a dollar or two.
My boat holds 105 gallons of diesel. A fill-up that cost me $200 three years ago costs north of $500 now. That’s a meaningful chunk of a twenty-thousand-dollar annual operating budget. I notice the price. I calculate the price. I time my fills to catch a dip that may or may not come. I am exactly the kind of buyer the fuel dock does not price for.
The crunchy cranky basement living commentariat will say just sail that sailboat! Yeah, except on the ICW, where the cheap marinas are, into and out of every cut on the east coast, every marina, harbor, and time I anchor. Never mind the time I run the generator because global climate change means my solar panels can’t generate enough to keep the batteries topped off.
The standard explanation for fuel cost difference is distribution cost. Small-volume delivery to waterfront locations. EPA compliance for over-water storage. Specialized pumps. Limited competition. And for a small marina near Hammock Beach, that explanation holds. The fuel truck drives out, pumps a few thousand gallons into a tank on a dock or into the waterfront property level taxed pad next to the pier, and the per-gallon overhead is real.
But drive a few hours south to Fort Lauderdale, and the story falls apart. Bahia Mar runs at least 50,000-gallon storage tanks. Port Everglades, one of the busiest petroleum ports in the country, sits a few miles away and can refill those tanks every few days during high season. Fuel barges with USCG-licensed captains idle on the Intracoastal, pumping MGO dockside at rack-plus-fifteen-cents per gallon. The volume is enormous. The delivery distance is nothing. The infrastructure is industrial.
And the fuel dock still charges rack-plus-two-dollars.
Why? Because the market-setting customer does not care.
A 200-foot superyacht runs $2 to $4 million a month in operating costs. Crew. Insurance. Refit. Provisions. A trip to the Bahamas and back might burn over $50,000 to $80,000 in fuel. On a $3 million monthly nut, the fuel bill is 2%. Noise. The captain calls the barge, 8,000 gallons get pumped aboard, the invoice goes to a management company in Monaco, and nobody in the ownership chain reads the line item.
The fuel dock doesn’t price for the guy with the 28-foot fishing boat who feels every dollar. The fuel dock prices for the guy whose boat burns $400 worth of fuel idling out of the cut. The small buyer pays the big buyer’s price because the big buyer set the market and the small buyer can’t drive his boat to the truck stop.
The Clearing Price Problem
This is the mode problem scaled to every market in America.
Housing doesn’t price for the modal buyer. A private equity firm bought 50 houses in your zip code with leveraged debt at rates you’ll never see, converted them to rentals, and set the comparable sales price for the neighborhood. Now the family making $42,000 a year can’t buy a starter home because the “market rate” was set by an institution that borrows at 4% and rents at whatever the tenant can physically survive paying. When the rental market softens, when PE discovers that you cannot extract infinite rent from finite wages, the houses sit. Days on market climb. Inventory stacks up. And the price doesn’t come down because the institutional owner would rather hold a vacant property than lower the comparable.
Cars don’t price for the modal buyer. The average new car transaction price crossed $49,000 in 2025. More than the modal worker’s annual gross income. The monthly payment, stretched to 72 or 84 months because nobody can afford the 48-month payment anymore, comes loaded with subscription charges for features that are already soldered to the circuit board.
Gas doesn’t price for the modal buyer. Oil markets respond to geopolitical shocks, refinery capacity, and speculative trading by institutions managing billions in commodity futures. The price at the pump is the residue of decisions made in boardrooms and trading floors by people who will never stand at a gas station and choose between filling the tank and filling the refrigerator.
In every case, the price is set by a buyer for whom the cost is trivial. And in every case, the buyer for whom the cost is existential pays the same price. The mean income says the economy can afford it. The mode says it can’t.
What the Mode Would Show
If the Bureau of Labor Statistics published a modal wage report, and if economists measured GDP against the purchasing power of that modal wage, the narrative would break open.
A worker earning $40,000 a year takes home roughly $2,800 a month after federal and state taxes and FICA. In Florida, with no state income tax, the number is marginally better. Call it $3,000.
Rent on a modest apartment in a mid-tier Florida market runs $1,400 to $1,800. Car payment on a used vehicle runs $400 to $600. Insurance, health, and auto combined run $400 to $600. Utilities and phone run $200 to $300. Gas at $4.32 a gallon for a 30-mile daily commute runs $250 to $350 a month. Groceries for a single person run $350 to $500.
Add it up, and you’re at $3,000 to $4,150 in non-discretionary monthly spending on a $3,000 monthly paycheck. The math doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked for years. The gap gets covered by credit cards, by second jobs, by skipping meals, by choosing which bill to pay late this month. The gap isn’t covered by the GDP growth rate.
When the President stands at a podium and says the economy grew at 2.5%, he is telling the mathematical truth. He is also telling the diner lie. The billionaire walked into the room and the average went to the moon and the five people at the counter are still trying to figure out how to cover the check.
The Honest Number
The mode is the honest number. It measures where the most Americans are, not where the average says they should be. It can’t be dragged upward by a tech billionaire’s stock options or a hedge fund’s carried interest. It sits where the largest pile of real human paychecks lands, and it doesn’t move until those paychecks move.
Since 2016, the mode hasn’t moved. Not in real terms. Nominal wages went up. Prices went up faster. And the distance between the modal paycheck and the monthly cost of being alive in America has been growing wider every year while the mean and the median performed their statistical magic show for an audience that desperately wanted to believe the trick was real.
The mode is the reason the mean is a meanie. Not because the math is wrong, but because the math is measuring the wrong room.
I can see the gas station from my boat. The 26-year-old boat I bought with the money from selling my house. The one that depreciates to the weight of its fiberglass. The one that costs twenty grand a year to keep afloat in a country where the economy supposedly grew at 2.5%.
The numbers on the sign changed again while I was writing this. They went up.
About the Author
