The good news is that Americans have never been richer. The bad news is that most of them don’t feel like it.
There has been tremendous growth in income and wealth in the US in the last half century, even for poorer and middle-class households. But because of the nature of that growth, as well as the changing structure of the national economy, a lot of the people who have benefited also believe that the economy isn’t working for them.
It is true the middle class is shrinking. In the 1960s the income distribution of US households looked like a bell curve with a very thick middle. Today there are fewer Americans in the middle — largely because many have joined the ranks of the upper-middle class. In 1967, a little more than 5% of Americans earned or received more than $150,000 (in 2024 dollars). Now more than 30% do. And it’s not just the middle class that moved up: In 1967, more than 38% earned or received less than $50,000. Now that figure is 21%.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Bloomberg Opinion (paywall)
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
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