The Two Economies: Comparing Top 40% and the Bottom 60%

To give you a sense of what the picture below the averages looks like, we broke the economy into two economies—that of the top 40% and that of the bottom 60%.* We then observed how conditions of the majority of Americans (the bottom 60%) are different from the conditions of those of the top 40%, as well as different from the picture conveyed by the average statistics. We focused especially on the bottom 60% because that's where the majority of Americans are and because the picture of this economy is not apparent to most people in the top 40%.