What the dwindling youthful population of Europe believes and how their views differ from their aging and far more numerous elders may go a long way toward determining Europe’s fate.
Strengthening the economy has been one of the public’s top priorities for the president and Congress going back even before the Great Recession. Here are key takeaways from our surveys on the state of public opinion about the economy.
The gap between America’s upper-income and middle-income families has reached its highest level on record. In 2013, the median wealth of the nation’s upper-income families ($639,400) was nearly seven times the median wealth of middle-income families ($96,500).
The median wealth of white households was 13 times the wealth of black households and 10 times that of Hispanic households in 2013, compared with eight and nine times, respectively, in 2010.
The world’s third largest economy faces long-term challenges, including pessimistic forecasts from the Japanese public, the hollowing out of Japan’s working-age population and the nation’s exorbitant public debt.
Although the official unemployment rate was down to 6.2% in July, many economists and other analysts have concluded that that measure doesn’t fully capture what’s happened to the U.S. economy since the Great Recession officially ended in the summer of 2009.
For the first time in decades, the non-marital birth rate in the U.S. has been declining. It’s likely that the decline occurred as a result of the economic recession of 2007-2009.