(Community Matters) I’d forgotten this NYTimes study: during the last 8 years rise in lower income, shrinking middle & upper – percentage of households in high income have declined while those in low income has risen. The middle class has been declining since the late 70s but since 2009, so has been the number of Americans in upper income. Younger are doing worse, education even more important, race matters.
I learned from a friend who does business globally (more overseas than here), there’s two ways to think about this.
While millions of Americans have slipped from the middle class into low income, hundreds of millions of Asians have risen from absolute poverty to middle income. There are a lot of super rich who consider their economic constituency global rather than domestic.
The American middle class is shrinking http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-12-13/american-middle-class-shrinking. And, there are a lot more Americans living well today than ever before. Nevertheless, there are more on the top side and more on the bottom side of income/earnings in America, fewer in the middle (in the 60s, 61%, today only 50%), according to Pew.
“The share of middle-income adults who are ages 65 and older doubled from 9 percent in 1971 to 18 percent in 2015,” the Pew study finds.
study by New York Times which is more illuminating of the last decade: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-10/here-s-how-much-the-u-s-middle-class-has-changed-in-45-years
Community Matters 