What counts as enough progress?

Steven Horwitz In last week's Washington Post, Robert Samuelson reported on the results of the Pew Mobility Project, looking at the income and wealth mobility of Americans over the last several decades.  Although not all the news is good, most of it is.  A couple of highlights:

Ryan Avent wants to know why it's so damn hard to let a developer put up a building where they want.  Kevin Drum offers an answer:

Here is one bit from a very good Robert Gordon essay (which I will cover again in a while): ...if one starts down the road of comparing changes in life expectancy, the yearly rate of increase in life expectancy at birth during 1900–50, resulting in substantial part from the inventions of the Second Industrial Revolution, was 0.72 percent per year, the 0.24 percent annual rate during 1950–95.

Here is my NYT column from today, on themes relevant to The Great Stagnation.  I won't rehash this entire discussion, but I would like to focus on this one column excerpt:

David Cay Johnston writes about stagnating wages: America grew and grew during this era. GDP, adjusted for inflation and increased population, was up 227 percent. But wages and fringe benefits did not grow with the economy. For most workers, they fell. Wages peaked way back in 1972-1973, were on a mostly flat trajectory for more than two decades, rose briefly in the late 1990s, and then fell sharply in the new century.

Given major delays in retirement plans, 80 is the new 65 says CNN Money. A quarter of middle-class Americans are now so pessimistic about their savings that they are planning to delay retirement until they are at least 80 years old -- two years longer than the average person is even expected to live.

|Peter Boettke| Tyler Cowen caused quite a stir with his e-book, The Great Stagnation.  In properly assessing his work it is important to state explicitly what his argument actually is.  Median real income has stagnated since 1980, and the reason is that the rate of technological advance has slowed.  Moreover, the technological advances that have taken place with such rapidity in recent history have improved well-being, but not in ways that are easily measured in real income statistics.