A "Boom that Wasn't"

David Leonhardt, writing in the New York Times, calls it "a boom that wasn't" for many Americans:

The bigger problem is that the now-finished boom was, for most Americans, nothing of the sort. In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500.

Yes there have been growth periods when some segments of the workforce don't do well. But this one was different:

“We have had expansions before where the bottom end didn’t do well,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who studies the job market. “But we’ve never had an expansion in which the middle of income distribution had no wage growth.”

Political candidates like to talk about the forgotten middle. This time, there seems to be something to the rhetoric.
Chart: New York Times