Wealth

Have upper-middle-class Americans been winners in the modern economy — or victims? That question has been the subject of a debate recently among economists, writers and others. On one side are people who argue that the bourgeois professional class — essentially, households with incomes in the low-to-mid six figures but without major wealth — is […]

In 10 years, more than half of middle-income Americans age 75 or older will not be able to afford to pay for yearly assisted living rent or medical expenses, according to a study published Wednesday in Health Affairs. The researchers used demographic and income data to project estimates of a portion of the senior population, those who […]

The country is facing a retirement crisis, but some Americans are worse off than others. Workers in the top 20% of earnings distributions have half of all retirement wealth in both 1992 and 2010, compared with the bottom group, which saw its share fall from 3% to 1% between those years, a recent analysis at […]

While hiring in the U.S. rebounded in March, baby boomers who are still in the work force are not doing so great. Employment for people aged 55 and over dropped 209,000 last month, the biggest monthly decline since February 2015 when 251,000 jobs were cut for the age group, according to data from Bureau of Labor […]

Today, in the wake of the Great Recession, with crisis now the norm, one wonders if the U.S. economy ever really recovered from the 1970s industrial crisis to begin with. Perhaps, instead of progressing, our economy has somehow regressed—returning to old patterns of the distant past. We live, writes the labor historian Jefferson Cowie in The […]