Many of us who watch the economy are slaves to what's changing in the relatively short-term, but it can be useful to anchor oneself in patterns over longer periods. Here's a graph from the 2019 Economic Report of the President, which relates wealth and consumption to levels of disposable income over time.
The red line shows that total wealth has typically equal to about six years of total personal income in the US economy: a little lower in the 1970s, and a little higher in recent years at the peak of the dot-com boom in the late 1990s, the housing boom around 2006, and the present.
The blue line shows that total consumption is typically equal to about 0.9 of total personal income, although it was up to about 0.95 before the Great Recession, and still looks a shade higher than was typical from the 1950s through the 1980s.
Total stock market wealth and total housing wealth were each typically roughly equal to disposable income from the 1950s up through the mid-1990s, although stock market wealth was higher in the 1960s and housing wealth was higher in the 1980s. Housing wealth is now at about that same long-run average, roughly equal to disposable income. However, stock market wealth has been nudging up toward being twice as high as total disposable income in the late 1990s, round 2007, and at present .
A figure like this one runs some danger of exaggerating the stability of the economy. Even small movements in these lines over a year or a few years represent big changes for many households.
What jumps out at me is the rise in long-term stock market wealth relative to income since the late 1990s. That's what is driving total wealth above its long-run average. And it's probably part of what what is causing consumption levels relative to income to be higher as well. That relatively higher level of stock market wealth is propping up a lot of retirement accounts for both current and future retirees--including my own.
A version of this article first appeared on Conversable Economist.
Truly an eye-opener!
Agreed with you here
Interesting analysis...
Flat tax is the way to go.
Poor people spend a fraction of what rich people spend yearly into the economy.
Timothy Taylor is an American economist. He is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, a quarterly academic journal produced at Macalester College and published by the American Economic Association. Taylor received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Haverford College and a master's degree in economics from Stanford University. At Stanford, he was winner of the award for excellent teaching in a large class (more than 30 students) given by the Associated Students of Stanford University. At Minnesota, he was named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Department of Economics and voted Teacher of the Year by the master's degree students at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. Taylor has been a guest speaker for groups of teachers of high school economics, visiting diplomats from eastern Europe, talk-radio shows, and community groups. From 1989 to 1997, Professor Taylor wrote an economics opinion column for the San Jose Mercury-News. He has published multiple lectures on economics through The Teaching Company. With Rudolph Penner and Isabel Sawhill, he is co-author of Updating America's Social Contract (2000), whose first chapter provided an early radical centrist perspective, "An Agenda for the Radical Middle". Taylor is also the author of The Instant Economist: Everything You Need to Know About How the Economy Works, published by the Penguin Group in 2012. The fourth edition of Taylor's Principles of Economics textbook was published by Textbook Media in 2017.
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