David Leonhardt has a great new article about measuring economic progress. This graph shows the main problem with GDP. It has become completely divorced from the reality for 90% of Americans: By The New York Times | Source: Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel…

The distribution of income deserves more attention. One reason why college seems less affordable is that average real wages for young people have fallen since the 1970s whereas tuition has risen. A lot. Of course, the average college student doesn’t…

Kevin Drum reports that the official census bureau measure of: household income is now at an all-time high: And now for the buzzkill portion of this post: this means household income has increased a whopping 0.6 percent since 1999. That’s $22…

The Atlanta Fed regularly publishes a measure of median nominal wage growth for several interesting demographics, but for some reason, they don’t publish any measure that is adjusted for inflation, so I created one using a running 2-month average of…

In 2010, Jon Gertner at the NYT published an excellent history of the idea of GDP and its deficiencies.  One paragraph mentions that median income is better than GDP, but  the article focuses more on a “willfully obscure” initiative called…