Rachel Wolff
speaker
45 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Rachel Wolff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And, you know, it's been this steady decline over the past decade.
So it's not just that it has gotten harder, which it has.
It's that people no longer believe it's possible for them.
So by many measures, economists told me people are actually right to feel that their shot at success has diminished.
I spoke to an economist at Washington DC think tank, the bipartisan policy center, who pointed to the continued decline of private sector pensions, which has led to their near disappearance and the surge in the cost of homeownership as two of the biggest economic changes over the past decade.
We've also seen economic mobility decrease, which is
the odds that you're going to do better than your parents or find a way out of poverty.
And we've seen inequality increase.
If you were born in 1940, you were almost guaranteed to do better than your parents.
Around 90% of children born in 1940 were ultimately better off than them.
That's only true for about half of people today.
So the chances that you're actually going to out-earn your parents that you're going to have a better life than they had have gotten significantly smaller.
The economists that I spoke to were mostly in agreement that people are right to feel that they're shot at the American dream in how it's traditionally defined have gone down.
There are some mitigating factors, such as the fact that over the past couple of years, wages for the lowest earners have actually outpaced other groups.
We've seen a little bit of a turnaround, but it has not been nearly enough to compensate for recent decades.
A lot of people told me about not being able to achieve the financial milestones they would have expected to and that kind of messing up the rest of their plans.
So I spoke to a couple in Louisville who told me that they were surprised when $250,000 wasn't enough for them to buy a starter house and they feel like they can't get engaged, they can't plan a wedding, they can't plan for kids because they need to have the house in order to do all of those things that they can't
hit this first rung on this ladder.
And so then they can't keep moving.
So they feel pretty stuck.
Showing 21–40 of 45 · page 2 of 3
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