Productivity grew by roughly 60%. Compensation grew by roughly 16%. That split has held for more than four decades, and the professionals who created the value never collected the difference. A February 2026 research brief from Lossdog, a fintech startup launched by the duo that created thinkorswim and tastytrade, now pins a number to the damage: $3.9 million in uncaptured salary over a typical 30-year professional career, modeled conservatively for someone earning $75,000 a year with standard 4% annual raises.
The figure sounds staggering. The economics behind it are painfully straightforward.
Between 1948 and 1979, output per hour and worker pay rose nearly in lockstep. Economists considered the relationship so stable it resembled a law of nature. Then three forces collided: Paul Volcker's interest rate shock crushed organized labor's bargaining leverage, Milton Friedman's shareholder-first doctrine redirected corporate surplus toward stock buybacks and dividends, and equity-linked executive pay packages created a parallel compensation universe with no ceiling. Typical worker pay stalled. CEO compensation ballooned 1,094% between 1978 and 2024 while rank-and-file pay inched up just 24% over the same stretch.
The Economic Policy Institute's Productivity-Pay Tracker, updated through the third quarter of 2025, captures the split in hard terms. Economy-wide net productivity reached an index value of 412.3, meaning output per hour grew 312% since 1948. Typical worker compensation hit just 253.6, reflecting growth of only 154%. The 57-point divergence represents income that flowed to executives and capital owners rather than the professionals who produced it.
The Structural Cage
What makes the gap so persistent is the architecture underneath it. Economists writing in the Harvard Law Review have identified five reinforcing mechanisms that keep professional pay suppressed: non-compete agreements binding roughly 30 million American workers, deep information asymmetry where employers aggregate salary data across thousands of hires while each professional enters negotiations armed with anecdotes, firm-specific knowledge that grows more valuable internally but transfers poorly, geographic clustering that concentrates professional roles in a handful of expensive metros, and search frictions that make a confidential job hunt nearly impossible while performing at a high level.
A 2022 study analyzing more than 8,000 geographic-occupational labor markets found the average concentration level nearly doubled the Department of Justice's threshold for "highly concentrated." The math translates to the equivalent of 2.3 competing employers per market. Sixty percent of all professional labor markets exceeded the federal government's own red line for antitrust concern, yet because these were employment markets rather than product markets, the concentration drew almost no regulatory attention.
The compensation impact is clinically precise. Matched employer-employee data analyzed in the Journal of Labor Economics revealed a 20-to-30% markdown between a professional's marginal revenue product and actual wages. A worker generating $125,000 in revenue might collect between $87,500 and $100,000. Over 30 years, the monopsony markdown alone compounds to roughly $840,000 in lost nominal salary, independent of the broader productivity gap.
A Billion-Dollar Founder Turns to Paychecks
Tom Sosnoff has spent 25 years putting financial tools into the hands of people who were told they did not need them. He co-founded thinkorswim, a retail options brokerage that went public in 2007 and was acquired by TD Ameritrade in 2009 for $750 million. He then co-founded tastytrade, which grew into the largest streaming financial network globally, logging over a billion views before IG Group acquired it in 2021 for $1.1 billion.
"I've spent my entire career democratizing access to financial markets," Sosnoff said. "Now, I'm going to do the same thing for career compensation and portfolio optimization."
His latest venture, Lossdog, headquartered in Chicago, attacks the pay gap with a subscription-based platform ($100 per year) that reads a user's resume against millions of data points, including government wage records, and produces a single precise market value. No ranges. No estimates. A number, down to the dollar, accompanied by a roadmap showing exactly how to close the distance between current pay and true market worth.
The company is pre-revenue and pre-product, with a planned debut in May. To build a massive waitlist ahead of that rollout, Sosnoff and co-founder Scott Sheridan, who traded alongside him on the CBOE floor starting in 1986, are backing the pre-release with a $6 million promotional campaign: $1 million in cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Stellar, or Solana, at each user's choice) distributed across 50,000 early sign-ups, plus $5 million in waived first-year subscription fees. (See more details and the waitlist at lossdog.com.)
"I've always believed in goodwill marketing as the best way to introduce new software," Sosnoff explained. "That's why I'm giving away $1 million in cryptocurrency and 50,000 free subscriptions to celebrate Lossdog's debut."
The Math That Makes It Personal
The Lossdog research brief co-authored by Jiajun Zou and Jeff Joseph, traces the $3.9 million figure through a 30-year projection using the same growth rates observed since 1979: productivity rising at 1.4% per year, pay rising at 0.6%. A professional starting at $75,000 in 2025 would accumulate roughly $4.45 million in total earnings over three decades. Had that same professional's compensation tracked productivity, total earnings would reach approximately $8.37 million. The gap, widening from 38.5% at the start to 51.5% by year 30, is measured in purely nominal, non-inflation-adjusted dollars, meaning purchasing value would be lower. But even after accounting for inflation, the divergence remains seven figures.
Labor's share of total national income has itself dropped seven percentage points since the early 1980s, falling from 65% to 58% of GDP. The decline is steepest where professionals generate the most value. The technology sector's labor share collapsed from 53% in 1987 to 30% in 2015. A software engineer earning $300,000 at a major tech firm captures less than 20% of the $1.5 million in revenue their employer generates per employee. More dollars, smaller slice.
Sosnoff and Sheridan are betting that visibility can change the equation. The premise is blunt: most professionals have been negotiating blind, armed with Glassdoor ranges and LinkedIn guesses while their employers wield proprietary salary survey data from Mercer and Korn Ferry. Lossdog's platform is built to flip that imbalance, handing individual workers the same granular intelligence that HR departments have held for decades.
Whether the platform delivers on that promise remains to be tested when the product arrives in Q2. But the data underneath the pitch, drawn from five decades of peer-reviewed research published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Human Resources, and Brookings Institution papers, is difficult to argue with. You do not need to feel underpaid to be underpaid. You only need to see the distance between what you earn and what you create.
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