How the Middle Class is Doing:
- What group should we measure in order to discover how the middle class is doing in America? The 20% of workers with the most median income
- Does it make sense to exclude the elderly when trying to measure the progress of the middle class over time? No; the majority of their "income" is from retirement benefits.
- Why does it matter if the composition of the middle class is changing when trying to assess the performance of the economy? Certain measurements include various age groups and demographics that others exclude, which skews the data to include more or less government benefits as well as other possible differences.
Extra Credit:
- The Paradox of Household Income
- How does the change in the marriage rate for people with low levels of education relative to people with high levels of education affect measured economic growth for the middle class? Someone who is uneducated and a single parent will be much poorer than an uneducated stay-at-home parent with an educated, working spouse.
- If the poverty rate didn't change very much when there was economic growth in the recent past, does that mean it will not change much if there is growth in the future? It all depends what methods of measurement are being utilized. Via this particular method, it is unlikely to see drastic change the way things are trending currently.
- Why does Roberts raise the possibility that lower marriage rates might be caused by the poor performance of the economy? Marriage where both spouses work displays a higher income per household, and married houses where one spouse works allows the stay-at-home parent to still display a high household income despite not being employed. When divorce happens, uneducated singles have a low income typically, and even an educated single still only shows the income of one person vs. two.
- If family structure had stayed constant, poverty would have fallen by 25% in the example in the video. But it actually fell by only 4%. Is one of these measure right and the other wrong? How would you decide? It isn't necessarily a matter of right or wrong but consistency. The lower marriage rates means more households per area, which means the overall averages aren't affected much, but I believe there is no crime in showing that divorce rates lead to a less functioning society. I believe it accurately reflects those implications.