For more context: "You hear a lot, in books, in the blogosphere, among pundits that the middle class is being hollowed out, the incomes for all but the top 1%

For more context: "You hear a lot, in books, in the blogosphere, among pundits that the middle class is being hollowed out, the incomes for all but the top 1% or maybe the top 20% are stagnating; that the gap between rich and poor has grown inexorably; that the American dream is dead" "[these claims] are basically wrong. And that's what 10 years of research by myself and James Sullivan at Notre Dame has shown. If you measure incomes better, accounting properly for inflation, median incomes have gone up by about 50% since 1980. And if you look at consumption, it's gone up by a similar amount over that whole period--though exactly when it went up is slightly different from the income pattern." http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/10/bruce_meyer_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/10/bruce_meyer_on.html