That change is particularly clear in a recent study conducted by Stanford and Harvard economists. In 1970, they found, almost all thirty-year-old Americans, 92 percent, were earning more than their parents had at that age and older. Among Americans in their early thirties in 2012, however, only half were earning more than their parents had—and for sons compared to fathers, even fewer. That enormous difference over two generations was mainly caused not by slower economic growth, the economists found, but by how American economic growth was shared after 1980. If we’d continued slicing the pie as
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