

The disappearing or non-disappearing middle class - xijuan
http://andrewgelman.com/2013/03/17/the-disappearing-or-non-disappearing-middle-class/

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El_Mariachi
"Beyond all this, there’s the challenge of reconciling these income data with
other things we’ve been hearing about economic trends. For example, I recently
read somewhere that Americans are three times richer than they were a few
decades ago […] a quick web search indeed shows something like a doubling of
inflation-adjusted GDP since 1970."

I’m no statistician, but I do know that GDP is at best only loosely correlated
with “wealth,” and it sure as heck doesn’t say anything about where that
wealth — or even the activity that it actually is a measure of — is
increasing.

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gluczywo
Positive correlation between GDP and wealth exists but it's hard to find
causality. GDP is a misleading terms in economics. Two major components that
Gross Domestic Product measures are private consumption and government
spending - things by definition unproductive.

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chad_walters
The amazing thing is that the "big bulge" that Evans referred to in the
original graph is clearly the bulge on the left (low-income) side of the
graph, while McArdle incorrectly focuses on the artifact on the right (high-
income) side -- and then none of the follow-on posts seem to point this
mistake out.

