U.S. News --- CAPITAL: Economic Surprises From Past Quarter Century
I arrived in the Washington bureau of The Wall Street Journal shortly after the stock-market crash of 1987. Except for a stint as Berlin bureau chief, I've been tracking the economy from that perch ever since.</br></br>Looking back over that quarter century, four surprises stand out:</br></br>That the American middle class hasn't done better</br></br>In a 1998 book, my colleague Bob Davis and I argued the U.S. was on the cusp of an era of broadly shared prosperity that would boost the middle class. We were wrong. We correctly saw the potential of information technology, but we expected the gap between winners and losers to narrow. It didn't.</br></br>Output of goods and services per person has grown by about 45% since 1987. That's substantial, but the percentage increase is only half the 90% increase of the preceding 26 years (1961-1987).