What presidential candidates need to understand about income inequality

But now it was possible, if painfully time-consuming, for an economist to follow distinct groups of Americans as their income rose or fell over a period of decades. And that meant you could track the progress of certain age groups throughout their lives, rather than bundling them together at any given moment with, say, college graduates in their first entry-level jobs.

So that’s what Shapiro decided to do by examining the data from the last five presidencies going back to Ronald Reagan’s.

The story we’re always told about incomes in America is one of “stagnation.” On both ends of the political spectrum, there’s an accepted wisdom that income growth for most Americans began to slow in the 1970s and has essentially flattened out. The American Dream is imperiled, our candidates are always telling us, because it’s getting harder and harder for new generations of middle-class Americans to do better financially than their parents did.

Shapiro’s exhaustive analysis tells a much more complicated — and ultimately more disheartening — story.

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