Its an age of economic worries.
A time when one of economists’ biggest worries is unemployment. Most never saw the collapse of the First Bubble coming. Or the rise of the Second Bubble behind it that made its predecessor seem almost quaint. Or the Great Recession that seeded fears the thought of the next bubble.
U.S. families earn less now then they did when the decade began. Median family income fell to $61,521 in 2008 from $63,099 in 2000, according to the most recent inflation-adjusted figures from the Census Bureau. A decade of declining income would be the first since the agency began tracking it in 1947.
The sense that we’ve lost ground is confirmed by the job market.
At the start of the decade, the economy employed 130.8 million people. Ten years later, the nation’s population has grown by more than 30 million, swelling the numbers of eligible workers. But the U.S. is shedding jobs. Today, the economy employs almost exactly the same number as it did when the decade began.
