The declne of the American worker started in 1943

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America is getting richer every year. The American worker is not.

Far from it: On average, workers born in 1942 earned as much or more over their careers than workers born in any year since, according to new research — and workers on the job today shouldn’t expect to catch up with their predecessors in their remaining years of employment.

Stagnant or falling earnings have put a squeeze on working- and middle-class households. The trend has also widened the gap between the rich and everyone else as, overall, the economy has continued to grow overall but the bulk of those gains have ended up in the pockets of the affluent.

These are some of the conclusions from a new working paper by a group of economists investigating the reasons for the decline of the American middle class. While economists have been concerned about recent data on earnings, the new paper suggests that ordinary Americans have been dealing with serious economic problems for much longer than may be widely recognized.

The new paper includes some “astonishing numbers,” said Gary Burtless, an economist at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution who was not involved in the research. “The stagnation of living standards began so much earlier than people think,” he said.

For instance, the typical 27-year-old man’s annual earnings in 2013 were 31 percent less than those of a typical 27-year-old man in 1969. The data suggest that today’s young men are unlikely to make up for that decline by earning more in the future.

Women have done much better than men. More women have entered the labor force and taken on more prestigious and remunerative careers. Still, women are making less than men over their working years, and women’s rising earnings have not made up for the decline in men’s incomes for the population as a whole.

Recently, women’s progress has stalled, in part due to the financial crisis. The typical female worker who was 27 in 2013 made no more than the typical woman of that age did in 1980.
n particular, the results show that more unequal incomes are not just a result of a widening gap between younger and older workers. Even among older workers, typical incomes have been falling while the wealthiest have been enjoying more and more of the economy’s gains. Poorer workers — who tend to be younger — will earn more as they get older, but they are not likely to earn enough to make up the difference.

“This idea that we’re having this progression of increasing incomes over time — I think that might be true for the upper regions of the income distribution but not for the median,” said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard University economist who was not involved in the study.

The new research shows that in the past, a good guide to forecasting typical career earnings among Americans of a given age has been their average income they were 25.

The implication, Guvenen argues, is that economists should search for explanations for households’ current financial woes in the youth and childhood of today’s workers.

“We are maybe looking at the wrong place for the solution to stagnation in wages and rising inequalities,” Guvenen said. “To understand higher inequality, we should turn and take a closer look at youth.”

I have long believed that the United States needs its own version of the French Revolution. No less than Thomas Jefferson recommended a revolution every generation. Thomas Paine was actually jailed during the French Revolution.

And, France has never recovered.

I hope we don't have a french style revolution, but the next one surely will be.

That's not a good thing.

in what way?

Reflections on the Revolution in France[1] is a political pamphlet written by the British statesman Edmund Burke and published in November 1790. One of the best-known intellectual attacks against the French Revolution,[2] Reflections is a defining tract of modern conservatism as well as an important contribution to international theory. Above all else, it has been one of the defining efforts of Edmund Burke's transformation of "traditionalism into a self-conscious and fully conceived political philosophy of conservatism".[3]

[T]he utmost caution ought to have been used in the reduction of the royal power, which alone was capable of holding together the comparatively heterogeneous mass of your states. But, at this day, all these considerations are unseasonable. To what end should we discuss the limitations of royal power? Your king is in prison. Why speculate on the measure and standard of liberty? I doubt much, very much, indeed, whether France is at all ripe for liberty on any standard. Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Prior to the revolution, France was THE superpower in the world. After the revolution (and to this day) it's just another mediocre European s**thole (that America has has to liberate twice!).

Utter nonsense.

France was one of the TWO superpowers of the world at the time. Britain and France were the only two in the superheavy weight class of superpowers. Within in that class France was already second to Britain- because Britain had already won control of North America, and of India, and of the seven seas, a generation earlier in the Seven Years War (aka "the French and Indian Wars"). By the time of the French Revolution France was second only to Britain in that top tier of two nations (second, but second in the top class). After the French Revolution, and after the wars of Napoleon, France was STILL second only to Britain in the super heavy weight class containing only two countries. And remained so until the two world wars.

France, and Britain both declined in RELATIVE terms because of the rise of other countries. Germany united and industrialized, and changed the whole balance of power in Europe. And the USA closed its frontiers and began to throw its weight around beyond North America. But none of that was the fault of the French Revolution, and all happened generations after the French Revolution anyway.

The Reign of Terror or The Terror (French: la Terreur) is the label given by some historians to a period during the French Revolution. Many historians believe it began in 1793, placing the starting date at either 5 September,[1] June [2] or March (birth of the Revolutionary Tribunal), while some believe it began in September 1792 (September Massacres), or even July 1789 (when the first decapitations took place),[3] but there is a general consensus that it ended in July 1794.[1][2]

Between June 1793 and the end of July 1794, there were 16,594 official death sentences in France, of which 2,639 were in Paris.[2][4] However, the total number of deaths in France was much higher, owing to death in imprisonment, suicide and casualties in foreign and civil war.

The article doesn't say the decline started in 1943. It says something like that it started for "workers born in 1943" (ie around 1973).