The Great Economic Devolution: Median wealth dropped 20% in 30 years

CEPR:

A NYT article reported on a study from Russell Sage reporting that median household the study is that median wealth is down by around 20 percent from 1984.

wealth was 36 percent lower in 2013 than 2003. While this is disturbing, an even more striking finding from

This is noteworthy because this cannot be explained as largely the result of the collapse of house prices that triggered the Great Recession. This indicates that we have gone thirty years, during which time output per worker has more than doubled, but real wealth has actually fallen for the typical family. It is also important to realize that the drop in wealth reported in the study understates the true drop since a typical household in 1984 would have been able to count on a defined benefit pension. This is not true at present, so the effective drop in wealth is even larger than reported by the study. (Defined benefit pensions are not included in its measure of wealth.)