Economy & Work

Overview Five years after the U.S. economy faced its most serious crisis since the Great Depression, a majority of Americans (63%) say the nation’s economic system is no more secure today than it was before the 2008 market crash. Just a third (33%) think the system is more secure now than it was then. Large […]

The release of 2012 statistics on the U.S. birth rates indicates a flattening of the sharp decline in fertility that accompanied the Great Recession.

As this year’s G20 summit begins in Russia, just 37% of people in participating nations think their country’s economic situation will improve in next year.

Are men losing interest in work? Male labor force participation rates in the United States have been in steady decline since at least 1950 while women’s labor market participation steadily rose before leveling off about a decade ago. Two recent analyses of U.S. Census data document this trend and offer some unexpected reasons why this […]

About half of Americans have a favorable view of labor unions, up 10 percentage points since 2011.

Although household-income growth for African-Americans has outpaced that of whites since the 1960s, those gains haven't led to any narrowing of the wealth gap between the races.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech 50 years ago today on Washington D.C.’s National Mall and Memorial Parks has become one of the most famous, and quoted, pieces of oratory in U.S. history (though that wasn’t apparent to everyone at the time). But how well have the aspirations King so memorably expressed been realized? We ran […]

Nearly half of American workers said they preferred to let their email pile up while on vacation and dig out when they got back; 42% kept up with mail every day.

Despite large and persistent gaps between blacks and whites on virtually every indicator of economic well-being, about half of all whites say the average black person is about as well off financially or doing better than the average white person, according to a survey released last week by the Pew Research Center.

Five decades after Martin Luther King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., a new survey by the Pew Research Center finds that fewer than half (45%) of all Americans say the country has made substantial progress toward racial equality and about the same share (49%) say that “a lot more” remains to be done.