Justin Fox Profile picture
9 Apr, 10 tweets, 5 min read
Yes, the story is a *lot* different if you go back farther than 2010, but for the past 1/5/10 years the part of the U.S. wealth distribution with the fastest-growing net worth is the bottom half bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
The Great Recession and its immediate aftermath were disastrous for the less-affluent half of America, but the past decade has been tons better bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
The bottom half's comeback doesn't look as nearly impressive when expressed as a percentage of total U.S. household wealth, but it's still been a sustained recovery bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
I've lumped the entire bottom half of the wealth distribution together because that's what @federalreserve does in its distributional financial accounts, but they do break down wealth by *income* quintiles, and that's pretty interesting bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
For the upper half of the bottom half I think the decline and rebound in net worth has mostly been about housing bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
For the bottom half of the bottom half it's been more about wages, and wage growth for low-wage workers has been pretty good since 2015 (although the 2020 numbers are skewed by the loss of so many low-wage jobs) bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
More on why 2020 wage-growth numbers for low-wage workers can't be believed, from @nick_bunker
While low-wage jobs were devastated by the pandemic recession, the CARES Act kept a lot of the people who lost those jobs afloat, and all indications are that there's going to be upward wage pressure again this year. So the rise of the bottom half seems set to continue ...
... and it needs to, because while the trajectory over the past decade has been great, at its starting point in 2010 the net worth of the less-wealthy half of America had fallen awfully close to zero bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
The source for (almost) all of this is the quarterly distributional financial accounts that the @federalreserve started publishing in 2019. They also sort wealth by age, generation, education and race, and the site is very user-friendly federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/da…

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More from @foxjust

3 Nov 20
I finally read the article this is based on and … it says that it's not at all clear yet how many of the excess deaths not attributed to Covid-19 are Covid deaths that were misattributed or really the result of other causes
"Deaths from circulatory diseases, Alzheimer disease and dementia, and respiratory diseases have increased in 2020 relative to past years, and it is unclear to what extent these represent misclassified COVID-19 deaths or deaths indirectly related to the pandemic"
Scott Atlas: He can read an X-ray, but apparently not a scientific-journal article
Read 5 tweets
13 Oct 20
Re today's Supreme Court decision to let the Census Bureau stop counting: the only states where it hasn't yet enumerated 99.9% or more of housing units are Louisiana (98.3%), Mississippi (99.4%) and South Dakota (99.8%) 2020census.gov/en/response-ra…
Also big shout-out to Minnesota for having the highest self-response rate Image
A little background: the original deadline was July 31, and in April for obvious reasons the Census Bureau announced that it was extending it to Oct. 31 census.gov/newsroom/press…
Read 6 tweets
13 Oct 20
I have inspired a pro-iceberg rant from @davidchang. My work for the year is complete
To be sure, my column did mention the possibility that the long iceberg decline was ending, with this 2018 @hels manifesto as the turning point newyorker.com/culture/kitche…
But I really wouldn't that to stand in the way of content like this Image
Read 4 tweets
13 Oct 20
Wrote a column on what may turn out to be the biggest news of 2020, the possible eclipse of head lettuce (iceberg, mainly) by leaf lettuce. With appearances by @hels, Nora Ephron, @AliceWaters, John Waters, @amandamull and (uncredited) @JamesSurowiecki bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Here's the money chart Image
But that's not all the leafy green data available from @USDA_ERS! Here, for example, is what's been happening with spinach Image
Read 11 tweets
28 Sep 20
At some point after the Covid-19 pandemic fades, mortality rates will drop below normal. But there's not much sign in the data that this is happening yet
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
People keep thinking this low-mortality period has already arrived in the U.S. because of the way the CDC reports excess deaths, but the data for the past couple of months are incomplete and CDC efforts to correct for the incompleteness never quite do the trick Image
In fact, because of a change in methods on Sept. 9, the CDC warns that "estimates for the most recent weeks for the US overall are likely underestimated to a larger extent than in previous releases" cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr… Image
Read 8 tweets
25 Sep 20
I made a column with lots of charts (evergreen Tweet) bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
This year has already broken the record for the number of corporate bankruptcies of $1 billion or more, according to NYU's Edward Altman. But by some other bankruptcy measures it's not a record-breaker at all Image
The overall number of business bankruptcies is (as of the second quarter, at least) near a 40-year low Image
Read 8 tweets

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