The April jobs report, released on Friday, brought more incrementally good news for the economy: The unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent, the lowest it’s been since late 2000. “The big thing to me was cracking 4,” President Donald Trump told reporters. “That hasn’t been done in a long time.... We’re doing great.”

But the report also contained a now-familiar disappointment: wages remain stagnant. Average hourly earnings rose by 4 cents over March, bringing the total increase over the past year to just 67 cents, or 2.6 percent. Factoring in consumer inflation, the real increase is close to zero.

This is not how the economy is supposed to work. Pay is supposed to increase during periods of low unemployment, because workers have more power to demand raises from their current employer, or else leave for a better-paying job, while employers have to pay more to retain employees and to compete for new ones. That’s what happened during the jobs boom of the late 1990s, when wages jumped as high as 5 percent annually.

But that hasn’t happened to a meaningful degree today, defying expectations and confounding economists. It’s intuitive that employers don’t like increasing wages, because that leaves fewer profits for them. But economic dynamics like low unemployment are supposed to force their hand. So why have workers not seen the benefits in their paychecks from one of the longest periods of economic and employment growth in history?

It could be due to a variety of factors, but they all point to the same basic idea: Capitalism, as it’s practiced in the United States, has broken economics. Employers have been allowed, through laissez-faire policies, to build up enough power that they’ve become impervious to how economic models dictate they should react.