If the U.S. economy is doing well, why do so many Americans say it's terrible?

doubled. For several decades after World War II, ordinary workers’ inflation-adjusted wages (known as “real wages”) increased by 2 percent each year. But since 1979, real wages have grown by only 0.3 percent a year.[21] Astonishingly, the real wages for many Americans today are roughly what they were forty years ago. Ninety percent of Americans who

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A second crisis was economic, or to be more precise financial, triggered by years of irresponsible mortgage lending, high-risk investments, and inadequate regulation of banks and other financial institutions in the United States and Europe. These practices came home to roost in 2007 and 2008, and it was not long before the crisis grew dramatically

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the unemployment rate is usually taken to be a lagging indicator. And sometimes it is. After a recession, businesses may not hire new employees until they are confident about the prospects for recovery, and it can take a long time to get all the unemployed back to work again. But the unemployment rate can also be a leading indicator for consumer de

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Over the past several decades, the wages of working-class families have stagnated while corporate buybacks, executive compensation, and mergers and acquisitions have boomed.1 For many Black working families in particular, who have never been permitted to participate fully in economic opportunities,2 racial income and wealth gaps have only grown.

Personal fortunes have outpaced the public purse, slowly choking public investments. This trend has occurred in red and blue states alike. Between George H. W. Bush’s time in the Oval Office and Donald Trump’s, incomes in Oregon grew by 112 percent, far outpacing increases in education spending, which grew by only 54 percent. During that time, inco

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