clustered behind national barriers, what was good for…

““clustered behind national barriers, what was good for General Motors was good for America. The annual gross domestic product figure meant as much to GM’s American customers as it did to the company. If the US economy grew by 5 per cent, there was a high chance the auto-maker’s bottom line had expanded by a similar amount. America’s median income growth rose in line with GDP. Much the same could have been said of Britain’s ICI, or Rolls-Royce. That is an outmoded way of measuring growth in today’s world. Since 2009, the US economy has expanded by roughly 2 per cent a year. Yet it took until 2015 for the median income to regain the level it enjoyed before the Great Recession. Perhaps ‘enjoyed’ is the wrong word. The median income in 2007 was below what it was in 2002, at the start of the business cycle that lasted for most of George W. Bush’s presidency. What is good for Apple may not be good for America. It shuttered its last US production facility in 2004. The Bush expansion was the first on record where middle-class incomes were lower at the end of it than at the start. Today, the US median income is still below where it was at the beginning of this century. Clearly what the typical American understands by growth differs greatly from that of macroeconomists. GDP numbers insist we are doing well, at a time when half the country is suffering from personal recessions. The””

— Edward Luce