Let’s see what fraction of the economic pie goes to workers in the form of wages, and let’s see if it has changed over the years. The “wage share” seems like it should be easy to calculate, but there’s a problem. That problem brings us back to the big idea of opportunity cost. The problem itself is straightforward: When a small business owner makes money, should we count that as “wages” or as “profit?” Usually, a small business owner is working at the business most days, doing the kinds of tasks that you could easily pay someone else to do: In other words, from the looking-in-the-window perspective, a business owner looks like a worker, and workers earn wages. But since the owner gets to keep all the profits that are left over after paying off the other workers and the bank, it looks like the money that he or she earns should count as profit.