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February 27, 2018

From The New York Times:
[Steven] Pinker contends that we should not be nostalgic for the economy of the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong. A third of American children lived in poverty. Sixty percent of seniors had incomes below $1,000 a year. Only half the population had any savings in the bank at all.
Between 1979 and 2014, meanwhile, the percentage of poor Americans dropped to 20 percent from 24 percent. The percentage of lower-middle-class Americans dropped to 17 from 24. The percentage of Americans who were upper middle class (earning $100,000 to $350,000) shot upward to 30 percent from 13 percent.
There’s a fair bit of social mobility. Half of all Americans wind up in the top 10 percent of earners at at least one point in their career. One in nine spend some time in the top 1 percent.
Poverty has been transformed by falling prices and government support. “When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the American poverty rate has declined by 90 percent since 1960,” Pinker writes.
America has a pretty big safety net. Our numbers look bad because so much of our health care spending is funneled through employers, but when you add this private social spending to state social spending, America has the second-highest level of such spending of the 35 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, after France.

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