Today’s Good Times Conceal Lurking Economic Troubles
The economy provides steady wealth increases at the top and a temporary recovery for everyone else.
It ends all too
Photographer: Wagner Meier/Getty Images South AmericaAmericans these days tend to make a distinction between the long-term and short-term state of the economy. When we talk about “the economy,” we typically mean unemployment, economic growth, asset prices and short-term wage growth -- what economists refer to as the macroeconomy. By these measures, the U.S. economy is doing quite well. But the longer-term picture is much less rosy.
The best thing about the economy at the moment is that almost everyone who wants a job has one or can find one. The employment rate for Americans who are mostly too old to be in college but too young to be retired is higher than it was before the Great Recession, and only a bit more than one percentage point lower than the all-time high reached in the heady days of the late 1990s: