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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 26 2017, @04:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the need-a-ladder dept.

In a sign of the fading American Dream, 92 percent of children born in 1940 earned more than their parents, but only half of those born in 1984 can say the same, researchers said Monday. Greater inequality in the distribution of growth is largely to blame, said the findings in the US journal Science. "Children's prospects of earning more than their parents have faded over the past half century in the United States," said the study, led by Raj Chetty of Stanford University. "Absolute income mobility has fallen across the entire income distribution, with the largest declines for families in the middle class."

Since little data exists linking children to their parents in terms of economic performance, researchers combined US census data with tax records, adjusting for inflation and other confounding variables. They found the sharpest declines in income in the industrial Midwest, including states like Indiana and Illinois. "The smallest declines occurred in states such as Massachusetts, New York and Montana," said the study.


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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday April 27 2017, @03:12AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Thursday April 27 2017, @03:12AM (#500497) Homepage

    Uh, no. No no no. No.

    For comparison, in 2015 Americans spent less than 10% on food in their budgets on average, and only 6.6% on food eaten at home, the lowest percentage out of a list of comparison countries.

    That graph there shows that the lowest 20% spent 36% of their income on food. That "less than 10%" only applies to the top 20%. We're not pulling biased statistics out of our ass, are we?

    BLS stats for today have seen the percentage of income spent on food, clothing, and housing drop from ~70% to ~50%.

    What about healthcare? One doctor's visit easily costs one month's paycheck for many families.

    Today, the average American house is about 2.5 times the size it was in 1950.

    Oh, goody. I don't suppose that metric includes the house sizes of all of the homeless? Might bring it down a few orders of magnitude.

    Meanwhile, amount of discretionary/non-essential income in the average budget has grown significantly over the decades.

    Averaged how? I can see how the multibillion dollar increase in discretionary income of the 1% has increased the average over the decades, but I don't think the bottom 50% living paycheck to paycheck have any non-negative discretionary income to speak of.

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