According to official measurements, the last few years have been a time of brisk prosperity, with unemployment down and the stock market up. Productivity advances all the time. For those who work for a living, however, nothing seems to improve. Wages do not grow. Median income is still well below where it was in 2007. Workers’ share of the gross national product (as opposed to the share taken by investors) hit a record low in 2011—and then it stayed there right through the recovery. It is there to this day; economists now regard its collapse as a quasi-permanent development.
