July 10, 2024
Has Income Growth between Generations of Americans Stalled?
A defining aspect of the American dream is that the economic well-being of each generation surpasses that of the previous one. However, commentators have questioned whether this holds true for the most recent generations. A 2022 Gallup poll found that only 42 percent of Americans expect today’s young people to have a better life than…
September 12, 2023
Please, Gen Z Aren’t “Doomed to be the First Generation of Americans Who Will Grow Up with a Lower Standard of Living Than Their Parents”
One could easily fill all the waking hours in the day—and non-waking hours, too!—with pointed responses to all the bad economic opinions expressed on social media. That said, I like to dip in every now and then with a humbly offered counterpoint. This week’s 9/11 anniversary, for example, meant the recycling of this passage from…
December 1, 2022
Was Rising Inequality Behind Falling Absolute Mobility? Reassessing Chetty et al. (2017)
In 2017, a widely publicized paper by a research team led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty found that while the vast majority of American kids born in 1940 ended up better off at age 30 than their parents fared at the same age, that was only true of half of kids born in 1980. Moreover,…