Bard College's Jerome Levy
Economics Institute, June 18-19, 1991. Authors: Susan E. Mayer and Christopher Jencks
The late 1970s and '80s are widely seen as hard times for poor families. While the aver- age American family's real in- come rose 11 percent be- tween 1979 and '89, for example, the real income of families in the bottom fifth fell by four percent. The poverty rate increased from 10.5 per- cent to 11.4 percent.
But all these figures are mis- leading, contend sociologists Mayer, of the...