Although the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, communities throughout the United States are still struggling to cope with the effects of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression. Unemployment is 8.6 percent, and income inequality is at its highest levels in decades. Despite incremental improvements over the course of 2011, metropolitan areas across America continue to suffer from sluggish hiring and lackluster growth.  

You’re just jealous. At least that’s how Mitt Romney sees it. The millionaire who posed for a picture with the boys at Bain Capital with the long green clinched between their teeth and poking out of their collars and jackets now says that people who question what he did there, and what rich people do now, are just green with envy. more

[Some] Pew stats on divorce that Kevin Drum highlights today (see fact sheet for more) are a good pretext for something I've been meaning to get off my chest for a while. When people look at income statistics, they often fail to explicitly account for the fact that there are tradeoffs between economic and non-economic aspects of life. more

Americans in 2012 enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe, the New York Times reports.In recent years, at least five large studies have identified a "mobility gap" in the United States.

Economic mobility is becoming a more prominent issue in the 2012 Republican presidential race, and will likely be widely discussed in the general election. more

At many banks, customers were automatically—often unwittingly—enrolled in overdraft programs that would permit debit purchases to go through even if it would overdraw their account, to the tune of up to $35 a pop. more

I’ve been meaning to write about income mobility for a while, and this new piece by one of my favorite economists in town, the Brookings Institution’s Scott Winship, prompts me to finally get around to it. What better way to start the new year than by learning that the American dream still lives on?