Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

Nevertheless, the data they released in October 2013 were astonishing. From the latest round of tax releases they calculated that of the growth generated by the economic recovery since 2009, 95 percent had been monopolized by the top 1 percent. That tiny fraction of the population saw their incomes rebound from the trough of the recession by 31.4 percent.16 Meanwhile, 99 percent of Americans had experienced virtually no gain in income since the crisis. The data were subsequently revised to show a less extreme disproportion.17 But in 2013 the numbers were a sensation. The slow growth in GDP that worried Summers, in fact, hid two radically divergent realities. Whereas a tiny elite were doing extremely well, for average Americans the secular stagnation thesis that Summers advanced as a tentative academic hypothesis was simply the lived reality of the last forty years. Since America’s bicentennial in 1976, productivity growth, which drove overall economic growth, and the returns to labor in the form of household incomes had starkly diverged. The average American shared only to a small degree in national economic growth as measured by GDP statistics. Almost all the benefits of growth were being monopolized by the highest paid and those