Good Reporting on the Economy

This story, from yesterday's USA Today, is one of the better recent pieces of reporting on the economy and inequality that I've seen. Here's the opening framing paragraphs and an excerpt from later on in the piece:

Work hard, play by the rules and tomorrow will be better than today. That implicit promise has been at the core of the American Experience through good times and bad.

But now, whipsawed by plummeting home values, $4-a-gallon gas, rising food prices and gyrating financial markets, Americans increasingly fear that the national bargain has unraveled, that their once-steady march toward affluence has derailed. In a new USA TODAY poll, 54% of those surveyed say their standard of living is no better today than five years ago.

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Writer James Truslow Adams was the first to coin the term "American Dream," writing in 1931 that it was "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement."

Amid the darkest days of the Depression, with the unemployment rate then heading toward 20%, Adams' ideal seemed more illusion than aspiration.

However, once the nation had escaped the clutches of economic collapse and world war, his vision was realized.

In a period that economists now refer to as the golden age, rich and poor alike prospered. From the end of World War II in 1945 to 1973, those at the bottom of the income charts actually advanced a bit faster than those at the top, in what Harvard University economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz labeled "growing together."

In recent years, however, most of the economic gains have gone to those at the top.

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