One might be tempted to think that people should be feeling pretty good about the economy right now. Five years of economic expansion are behind us and we are now operating during a sixth. The stock market has been surging and job growth has been solid.
But many people remain unconvinced that the economy has really improved and that’s because along certain key dimensions, it really hasn’t. Sentier Research, a firm led by former census officials, used Census data to estimate median housing income in the U.S. The researchers determined that median household income in June of 2014 was less than $54,000 per annum, down from approximately $55,600 in inflation-adjusted dollars when the economic expansion began in June of 2009.
In other words, since the economic recovery began, the purchasing power of the typical American family has declined 3.1 percent. That’s not where the story ends, however. The steepest declines in median income were among families with three or more children. As pointed out by writer Neil Irwin, the median income for this group declined 10.4 percent over the last five years. The good news is that more recently, median income has been on the rise.
