CHAPEL HILL -- Over the past three decades the American left has made much of the fact that income inequality in this country has been rising steadily - a rise, in its view, that constitutes ironclad evidence that the economy is increasingly troubled.
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To cut to the chase, over the past decade or so inequality in the U.S. has increased, median income has stagnated and the chances for upward mobility have dwindled.
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Moreover, as Edward Luce recently observed in The Financial Times, median household income actually fell by $2,000 during our last full-blown economic expansion (January 2002-December 2007), the first time in U.S. history that "most Americans where worse off at the end of a
cycle than at the start."
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In several careful papers Mazumdar argues that intergenerational mobility in the U.S. has long been significantly overstated, and that in terms of intergenerational mobility the U.S. today lags behind France, Germany, Canada, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, indeed, almost every high-income country for which data are available except the U.K.
For the full opinion piece:
http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/08/09/618119/were-seeing-more-inequality.html