It describes the experience of the privileged minority that is doing spectacularly well. In a bizarre twist of logic, the news has been good because the punditocracy admits only good news. Shifting Fortunes completes the picture. It reveals that financial security has become more elusive for most families and that the economic boom has been built on the sweat of the 30 percent of American workers who earn poverty or near-poverty wages. We are truly in a second Gilded Age.
Economic growth is the solution, they say, to the problems of poverty and low incomes.
There are two flaws to this popular view. First, growth no longer has the magical quality of benefiting everyone in recent years, growth has actually been associated with the immiseration of a whole group of workers. And second, the idea that the distribution of income is irrelevant is not supported by the scholarly evidence. It seems that relative position does matter. Health, well-being and satisfaction appear to be heavily influenced by the ways in which economic resources, prestige and social position are distributed.