Most Read Realitybase Posts in May

Is this what ended the American Dream? The Democratic Party lost its focus on economic security and prosperity and became more concerned with a range of other liberal values. This post had 10 times as many reads in three days as the second most popular post did in a month.

The American Dream died in February 1973 With graphs from multiple sources showing stagnation of inflation-adjusted middle class incomes since the 1970s after strong and steady post-WWII growth

The Citigroup Plutonomy Memos With key quotations from documents that are being disappeared.

The Dysfunction and Corruption of Our Healthcare System, Its Damage to the National Economy and other Basic Healthcare Matters (Guest Post) Describing a system that is destroying the American business economy and our ability to compete globally, which violates fundamental insurance risk principles, and which has inherent conflicts of interest that prevent quality national health care delivery and cost efficiency, and proposing a solution.

The history of US per-capita petroleum consumption will surprise you.  A graph and other data show US per-capita consumption of petroleum is down substantially from the 1970s, has been very stable since 1983 because of CAFÉ standards, and has fluctuated only slightly with retail price changes.

Why we should pay no attention to the macroeconomists behind the scientific curtain. Too many modern economists are over-involved in their pseudoscientific models and are not held accountable when their advice fails in the real world.

Comparative Advantage—The Unicorn of Free Trade A collection of sources and analyses demonstrating that the assumptions of classic Ricardian theory rarely if ever align with real-world conditions. Views of this 2009 post tend to spike every exam season.

One chart refutes three myths about US foreign trade. About Smoot-Hawley, the post-WWII export "boom," and "self-balancing" trade.

Two hypotheses why US CEO pay is so high Charts show that in the US CEO pay is about double that in other advanced countries, implying either that there is a shortage of talent in the US, or that the US CEO pay market is broken.

The US trade deficit is tribute paid to foreigners. And it's big. Nobel laureates Paul Samuelson and Paul Krugman and other prominent economists including Dani Rodrik, Alan Blinder, Martin Wolf, Larry Summers, Joseph Stiglitz, Dean Baker, and even Alan Greenspan have said that the US middle class is net worse off as a result of persistent trade deficits averaging 3% of GDP.