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February 20, 2025
The American Dream Is Not a Coin Flip, and Wages Have Not Stagnated
…David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Robert Manduca, Jimmy Narang, “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940.” Replication files available at https://opportunityinsights.org/data/?geographic_level=0&topic=0&paper_id=546#resource-listing. These results were the basis for…
January 16, 2025
Should We Believe the Economic Data or Americans’ “Lyin’” Eyes? The Answer Is Yes.
…United States. Inflation-adjusted median family income is at an all-time high. Median wealth is, likewise, at an all-time high. Only in 2020 and 2021 were the median weekly earnings of full-time male and female workers higher. The unemployment…
December 20, 2024
Fixing Inflation, Right-Sizing the Federal Government
…breaks in the series between 2013 and 2014 and between 2017 and 2018, the 2023 median would have been $99,028, compared with $98,964 in 2000.) Instead, today’s Census Bureau figures,…
June 18, 2024
Economic Opportunity and Social Mobility
…the one before it, that doesn’t seem to be the case. As they approach and pass age 40, Millennial men and women have higher median hourly wages than any previous…
October 31, 2023
It Takes Two
…difference. They could adopt curriculums that emphasize the “success sequence,” as does the Vertex Partnership Academies network of charter schools founded by my American Enterprise Institute colleague, Ian Rowe. The success sequence…
June 21, 2023
The Bad Math Behind Economic Doomerism
…Cost-of-Thriving Index (COTI). The index takes the combined cost of five essential goods and services—groceries, transportation, housing, health insurance, and higher education—and divides it by the median weekly earnings of…
June 14, 2023
Better Data Means Better Policy
…index before 2000. Figure 1. Median household income using various inflation measures, United States, 1967-2021 Since all three series are expressed in 2021 dollars, median income is equal to the…