Swell. We are poorer and more pessimistic.

Tell me something I don't already know.

"...the white working-class share of the adult population slipped to just under 50 percent in the Census Bureau's 2005 American Community Survey. That number has since fallen below 48 percent.


The demographic eclipse of the white working class is likely an irreversible trend as the United States reconfigures itself yet again as a "world nation" reinvigorated by rising education levels and kaleidoscopic diversity. That emerging America will create opportunities (such as the links that our new immigrants will provide to emerging markets around the globe) and face challenges (including improving high school and college graduation rates for the minority young people who will provide tomorrow's workforce).


As Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists Frank Levy and Tom Kochan report in a new paper, the average high-school-educated, middle-aged man earns almost 10 percent less than his counterpart did in 1980."

So much for the American dream. Read the rest here.