Median HH Income

Median income is down by 11% from its peak.  The median household is almost half way to the great depression. Felix Salmon:

Why has no one thought to do this before? Every month, the Current Population Survey goes out to a nationally representative sample of more than 50,000 interviewed households and their members. And in one of the questions, those households — or at least the households who didn’t answer the same question the previous month — are asked how much money they made, in total, over the past 12 months. That question has now been asked in 138 successive months, since January 2000. Which means that with a bit of clever analysis, it’s possible to put together an apples-to-apples comparison of what has happened to household income every month.
And when you do that, the results are very scary indeed.

 

...All of these numbers come from Gordon Green and John Coder, economists who both worked at the Census Bureau for more than 25 years. They’ve now set up a private company, Sentier Research, to collate these household income figures every month... Why is this work being outsourced to private-sector economists, rather than being done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and published officially?