Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

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Economy & Work

data essay

Who Sees Themselves as Working Class?

Most Americans think of themselves as working class today. While the identity is widely adopted by people across all income and educational groups, seeing oneself as working class has a heavy political tinge and differs by race and ethnicity.

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    Five Years after Market Crash, U.S. Economy Seen as ‘No More Secure’

    Overview Five years after the U.S. economy faced its most serious crisis since the Great Depression, a majority of Americans (63%) say the nation’s economic system is no more secure today than it was before the 2008 market crash. Just a third (33%) think the system is more secure now than it was then. Large […]

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    The disappearing male worker

    Are men losing interest in work? Male labor force participation rates in the United States have been in steady decline since at least 1950 while women’s labor market participation steadily rose before leveling off about a decade ago. Two recent analyses of U.S. Census data document this trend and offer some unexpected reasons why this […]

  • short reads

    Black incomes are up, but wealth isn’t

    Although household-income growth for African-Americans has outpaced that of whites since the 1960s, those gains haven’t led to any narrowing of the wealth gap between the races.

  • short reads

    King’s “I have a dream” speech, by the numbers

    Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech 50 years ago today on Washington D.C.’s National Mall and Memorial Parks has become one of the most famous, and quoted, pieces of oratory in U.S. history (though that wasn’t apparent to everyone at the time). But how well have the aspirations King so memorably expressed been realized? We ran […]

  • short reads

    Are blacks as financially well off as whites? Depends on whom you ask

    Despite large and persistent gaps between blacks and whites on virtually every indicator of economic well-being, about half of all whites say the average black person is about as well off financially or doing better than the average white person, according to a survey released last week by the Pew Research Center.

  • report

    King’s Dream Remains an Elusive Goal; Many Americans See Racial Disparities

    Five decades after Martin Luther King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., a new survey by the Pew Research Center finds that fewer than half (45%) of all Americans say the country has made substantial progress toward racial equality and about the same share (49%) say that “a lot more” remains to be done.

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