Most Read Realitybase Posts in June

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

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. Without control of the Democratic Party, labor and consumers lost a long and continuing series of tactical political battles.

American Youth: Digitally Skilled and Unemployable. A graph shows that Americans under 25, who presumably are the most familiar with digital technology, are losing employment share to those over 55, who presumably are least at home in the digital age. This counterintuitive trend started long before the Great Recession.

Canada has lousy health care. In a ranking of seven advanced nations, Canada's health care quality exceeds only the USA's, but Canada's costs are half as much per person.

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

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.

US job creation has been declining since April 2000 and is now in freefall. Discussion around a dramatic graph showing our employment-to-population ratio strongly increasing until 2000 followed by a devastating loss in 10 years of all the gains made in the previous 20 years.

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.

How the Luckiest Generation lived the American Dream A narrated slide show (in movie format) with graphs showing how Depression Babies surfed through life on a big wave of job creation, upward mobility, and rising real wages not seen before or since.

We probably need better college graduates, but we certainly don't need more. With charts showing young grads are massively unemployed and mal-employed and which majors are the best and worst.