Obama returns focus to America’s struggling middle class
As President Obama prepares to make a "major" speech on the economy today, our past reports describe the challenges the middle class has faced in the past decades.
Many Say Economic Recovery Is Still a Long Way Off
Overview Four years after the recession officially ended, the economic recovery remains a long way off in the view of many Americans. A new survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted July 17-21 among 1,480 adults, finds that 44% say it will be a long time before the nation’s economy recovers. Smaller percentages say either […]
Chart of the Week: Keeping track of the world’s richest people
If you've ever woken up wondering "Is Bill Gates or Carlos Slim the world's richest person today?", Bloomberg's new visualization of data on the 100 richest billionaires is for you.
5 facts about ethnic and gender diversity in U.S. newsrooms
Last week, San Francisco Bay area television station KTVU broadcast fake names for the pilots of the Asiana Airline flight that crashed on July 6. The error involved ethnic stereotyping, leading the Asian American Journalists Association to assert that these kinds of mistakes “underscored the importance of newsroom diversity” at America’s media outlets. A similar […]
Welcome to the Global Middle-Class Surge
By Alan Murray, President, Pew Research Center This op-ed was published in The Wall Street Journal on July 18, 2013. The mass uprisings this summer in Egypt, Turkey and Brazil are powerful reminders that the middle classes drive history. What remains unclear, however, is where they are driving it. The world today is witnessing its third great […]
The politics and demographics of food stamp recipients
The House on July 11 passed a farm bill stripped of funding for food stamps. A Pew Research survey last year found about one-in-five (22%) of Democrats say they had received food stamps compared with 10% of Republicans.
Public Esteem for Military Still High
More than three-quarters of Americans continue to believe that members of the military contribute “a lot” to society’s well-being. By contrast, only 37% say clergy make a big contribution to society, and journalists have dropped the most in public esteem since 2009.
Public Esteem for Military Still High
More than three-quarters of U.S. adults (78%) say members of the military contribute “a lot” to society’s well-being, according to a new survey of Americans’ views on various professions. By contrast, just 37% of Americans think the clergy contribute a lot, putting religious leaders well behind teachers, medical doctors, scientists and engineers.
New capital rules require U.S. banks to fatten their wallets
Banks are going to have to hold more capital as a cushion against losses, under new rules adopted today by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The Federal Reserve Board, which developed the rules jointly with the other banking regulators, approved them last week. The new capital rules, intended […]
Averages, medians and unemployment: Parsing the numbers
Every month when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its jobs report, people home in on one particular metric: the unemployment rate. But there are a lot of other interesting and potentially significant data in the report, though interpreting them appropriately can be tricky. Take, for example, the duration of unemployment. There’s little doubt that more […]
