Chart of the Week: Big drop in birth rate may be leveling off
The release of 2012 statistics on the U.S. birth rates indicates a flattening of the sharp decline in fertility that accompanied the Great Recession.
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Chart of the Week: Poverty by congressional district
In the 2000s, poverty rose more in Republican congressional districts than in Democratic districts, though it’s still more prevalent in Democratic districts.
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5 reasons Americans have the economic blahs
Despite modestly positive macroeconomic trends, many Americans feel lukewarm or worse about the economy. Five less-common indicators may help explain why.
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Obama returns focus to America’s struggling middle class
As President Obama prepares to make a “major” speech on the economy today, our past reports describe the challenges the middle class has faced in the past decades.
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Averages, medians and unemployment: Parsing the numbers
Every month when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its jobs report, people home in on one particular metric: the unemployment rate. But there are a lot of other interesting and potentially significant data in the report, though interpreting them appropriately can be tricky. Take, for example, the duration of unemployment. There’s little doubt that more […]
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The Mediterranean: Go for the beaches, not the mood
The Mediterranean is a sea of misery, according to the Pew Research Center’s recent report on global economic trends. Nations ringing the Mediterranean consistently rank at or near the top of multiple measures of pessimism in the 39-country survey. And, in what should surprise exactly no one, Greece has by far the bleakest outlook, topping […]
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Economic recovery favors the more-affluent who own stocks
While the stock market has been surging, there is a big gap who who benefits that has implications for the strength of the economic recovery.
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Europe’s unemployment conundrum
Continued high unemployment in Europe is fueling the debate over whether it is now time to stimulate the economy to spur job creation or to continue fiscal retrenchment to cut public debt.
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Young Adults Reduce Their Debt in Wake of the Recession
Young adults shrunk the amount of debt they were carrying by 29% between 2007 and 2010.
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Young Adults After the Recession: Fewer Homes, Fewer Cars, Less Debt
After running up record debt-to-income ratios during the bubble economy of the 2000s, young adults shed substantially more debt than older adults did during the Great Recession and its immediate aftermath—mainly by virtue of owning fewer houses and cars, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Federal Reserve Board and other government data. […]