Preface to the 2013 Edition

Abstract

Falling Behind was first published in 2007. Its central thesis is that the rapid growth in income and wealth inequality that began in the early 1970s caused substantial economic damage to middleincome families. I was grateful for the invitation from University of California Press to reflect on the basic message of Falling Behind in the light of events since then. Did the financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession cast doubt on my thesis? In a word, no. But it’s a fair question, since those events did upend the inequality trends at issue. Prior to the early 1970s, incomes had been growing at about the same rate for about three decades—slightly less than 3 percent annually—for families at all income levels. Between the early 1970s and 2007, however, almost all significant income gains in the United States were confined to the top quintile of the earnings distribution, and even those gains themselves were heavily concentrated among the top 1 percent.