The Epidemic of DespairMarch/April 2020 97
rising long before the recession began and continued to rise smoothly
and without pause after the recession ended, in 2009. The real roots o
the epidemic lie in the long-term malaise that began around 1970, when
economic growth in the United States slowed, inequality began to rise,
younger workers realized that they would never do as well as their par-
ents had done, and those without high-level skills fell further behind.
In the United States, the median
wage for men has been stagnant since
the early 1970s, even though ±½Ä has
risen substantially; men without a bach-
elor’s degree have seen their wages fall
for hal a century. There are echoes o
this pattern in some European countries, but they are only echoes.
Some other countries have also seen slowly growing or stagnant wages
over the last 20 years, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, and
Spain. Once again, the closest comparison to the United States is the
United Kingdom, where there has been no increase in median or aver-
age earnings for more than a decade—the longest period o wage stag-
nation in the country since the Industrial Revolution. Still, even the
British experience is but a shadow o the hal century o wage stagna-
tion and decline in the United States.
An important dierence between the United States and Europe is
that countries in the latter have well-developed social support systems
that can mute or reverse the worst impacts o shifts in the labor market.
In the United Kingdom between 1994 and 2015, for example, earnings
in the bottom tenth o¤ families grew much more slowly than earnings in
the top deciles. And yet owing to the redistributive mechanisms o the
British welfare state, the rate o growth in after-tax family incomes was
roughly the same across all sections o the population. Nothing o the
sort happened in the United States, where the social safety net is more
limited. Between 1979 and 2007, for example, incomes after taxes and
bene¥ts grew by 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent o U.S. house-
holds, by 65 percent for those between the 80th and 99th percentiles,
and by 275 percent for the top one percent. During this period, the
system o tax and transfers became less favorable for poorer Americans.
Europe is also not experiencing the same breakdown o marriage
on display in the United States. It’s common for couples to live to-
gether out o wedlock in Europe, but cohabitation there more closely
resembles marriage. The kind o serial cohabitation that often occurs
The roots of the epidemic lie
in the long-term malaise
that began around 1970.