Pam and Russ Martens — New Economic Study Presents a Disturbing Map of the United States

Those living in the bubbles of prosperity are largely unaware of the big picture, which is distorted by stats like per capita GDP.

Wall Street On Parade
New Economic Study Presents a Disturbing Map of the United States
Pam Martens and Russ Martens

See also

Asia Times
Despite recovery, 50 million Americans stuck in ‘distressed communities’

Asia Unhedged

Kava Vaghul — U.S. democracy stuck in an “inequality trap”

Social immobility, political repression, and economic discrimination.

Bad scene for the health of the republic.

We need to stop thinking of "inequality" simply or chiefly in economic terms.

This is an existential problem for liberalism.

These trends are, in part, related to deep-seated institutional marginalization….

There are a number of articles on this subject at WCEG today. This one is the lede.

WCEG — The Equitablog
U.S. democracy stuck in an “inequality trap”
Kava Vaghul, WCEG research analyst

Rick Bookstaber — The Bifurcated Society

Read it at Rick Bookstaber
The Bifurcated Society
by Rick Bookstaber
Senior Policy Adviser to the Financial Stability Oversight Council and Senior Policy Adviser at the SEC.

If you have been following the current debate about employment, the job guarantee, productivity, living standard, distribution, and creating a vision for the future, go read this. It's insightful in itself and important to this debate, as well as for policy in general.


BTW, this post shows that the informal economy is growing by leaps and bounds. The informal economy is work performed that is not recorded as a transaction, hence, not included in GDP. Recent estimates are that the informal economy is on the order to 10 trillion USD globally.