Re:Why is the stock market rallying when the economy is so bad?
by shuckles on Sunday May 10, 2020 @07:13PM
(#23137184)
No it also looks at income across generations within quartiles, e.g. "But [incomes of] 93% of the children in the poorest households — those in the bottom 20% — surpassed their parents...Julia Isaacs’s study for the Pew Charitable Trusts looking at the late 1960’s up to 2002 finds that children raised in the poorest families made the largest gains as adults relative to children born into richer families."
His main point seems to be that, if you track people over the last 30 years, they have made economic progress individually. That to me seems extremely obvious though. Someone who is 50 or 60 is almost certainly going to be in a better financial position than the same person at 30, as many people tend to develop more skills or advance their career, it would be straight-up crazy if that wasn't the case.
However, it does not address the actual issue of the poorest as a demographic. What people are saying that if the nation as a whole gets richer, you would expect that 40 years later the floor has risen as well, not that the poor are simply different people.