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Despite somewhat encouraging news this week that the middle and lower-wage workers appeared to see relief in 2015 as the US median household income finally rose, most Americans are much worse off than they were two decades ago.
This is not the product of the natural dips and bumps that typically punctuate our economy. According to a study released Thursday by Harvard Business School, the biggest threat to US competitiveness is our crippled political system and the “unrealistic and ineffective national discourse on the reality of the challenges facing the U.S. economy,” study authors reported.
“A lot of people think that what’s going in is we had a bad recession and that we’re just recovering,” Michael Porter, a study author and co-chair of Harvard’s Competitiveness Project, which conducts an annual survey of US business leaders, tells CNBC. “What we find is that all the major data points that started moving in the wrong direction started in the late 90s and 2000s.”
These data points plot a picture that doesn’t bode well for small businesses and average American workers, whose pay and job opportunities are declining as they’re competing with workers around the globe.
"We used to have the most skilled workers in world; now we don’t,” Dr. Porter says.
