• Financial Survival Network
  • Posts
  • How Great is Our Economy if the Bottom 50%’s Share of the Nation’s Wealth Has Plummeted Since 2009?

How Great is Our Economy if the Bottom 50%’s Share of the Nation’s Wealth Has Plummeted Since 2009?

October 02, 2023

by Charles Hugh Smith Of Two Minds

Something has been going very wrong in the US economy for a very long time, and whatever is going wrong accelerated from 2009 to the present.

Longtime readers know I’ve covered America’s soaring wealth and income inequality for many years, and so I read economist Noah Smith’s recent post entitled Working-class wealth is improving with keen interest. I respect Noah’s work, which is why I follow his Substack posts.

Here are some excerpts from his commentary:

“One of the truisms many Americans learned during the 2010s that turned out not to be so true is the idea that the wealth of the working class is relentlessly falling behind. The likely reason that people “learned” this “fact” is that it was true up until the financial crisis of 2008, and people didn’t recognize it and get mad about until the crash.