A Berkeley economist has stumbled on a trend an increasing number of Americans experience annually: We’ve had a pretend economy in the United States for at least 16 years. “Bottom 99% incomes grew by 3.9% from 2014 to 2015, the best annual growth rate since 1999,” Emmanuel Saez wrote in a paper on June 30, 2016.
A trio of researchers from the International Monetary Fund was much less oblique in a paper that they wrote last month on “the rise of income polarization — what some have referred to as the ‘hollowing out’ of the income distribution — in the United States, since the 1970s.”
“While in the initial decades more middle-income households moved up, rather than down, the income ladder, since the turn of the current century, most of polarization has been towards lower incomes,” Ali Alichi, Kory Kantenga, Juan Solé wrote.
It is worth noting that, during this time period, the survival rates of new businesses, as compiled by the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, decreased from 48.8 percent to 20.4 percent. So if you think that you have noticed an increasing number of “Going out of business” signs in the past 16 years, it is not your imagination.
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