The Decade in Which Everything Was Great But Felt Terrible

At the same time, the Great Expansion did not do much for working families. Wages are at last growing quickly at the bottom end, after years of slack demand holding down earnings. Still, it would take years and years of that kind of growth to chip away at the country’s inequality and to improve the standing of the country’s hourly employees relative to all workers. Research by Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, shows that the top 1 percent of families captured half of all real income growth between 2009 and 2017. The incomes of the top 1 percent have grown nearly four times as fast as those of the bottom 99 percent since the Great Recession ended. Inequality is now a 50-year story.

Middle-income families also faced a cost-of-living crisis. Most acutely on the coasts, but in metro regions across the country as well, a failure to build in dense urban neighborhoods spurred an egregious housing shortage that led to ballooning rents and long commutes. Millions of young families who tried to save for a home were unable to purchase one, sapped by the toxic combination of high rents and a lack of stock. Throw in sky-high child-care prices, spiraling out-of-pocket health-care fees, and heavy educational-debt loads, and the 2010s crushed a whole generation as it entered its prime earning years. The Millennials are on track to be the first generation in contemporary history to end up poorer than their parents—unless Gen X beats them to it.

The hyper-revving of the engine of mass-market consumerism arguably made life seem easier for some families. Free shipping, fierce competition among mega-retailers, the rise of online shopping, and money-losing delivery start-ups: These trends assuredly made “stuff” cheaper and more accessible for millions of customers, particularly relatively rich ones in urban areas.

But lower-income consumers have faced higher rates of inflation than upper-income consumers. Retailers pivoted to the one-percenters and left the 99 percenters behind, and who could blame them? Businesses go where the money is. The cost of services—elder care, preschool, veterinary care, dentistry, a college degree—sucked up every penny working-class families had, and more. Cheap baby clothes are nice, but publicly financed day care would be nicer.

The 2010s were a decade that left families fragile, unequal, and divided. These years made clear, if it wasn’t already, that the system is rigged for big businesses and the already-rich. They demonstrated that even a very good economy does not necessarily work for the middle class. The 2010s showed how bad everything could feel when everything was going great. This decade, we made it to late capitalism. We became late capitalism. We are late capitalism.

Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers economic policy.