How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Is the middle class shrinking?

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Is the middle class shrinking?

From the excellent Scott Winship:

Krueger’s claim of a shrinking middle class relies on the same peculiar definition. Specifically, “middle class” is defined as having a household income at least half of median income but no more than 1.5 times the median. I re-ran the numbers using the same definition and data source as Krueger and found that the entire reason the middle class has “shrunk” is that more households today have incomes that put them above middle class. That’s right, the share of households with income that puts them in the middle class or higher was 76 percent in 1970 and 75 percent in 2010—two figures that are statistically indistinguishable. For that matter, I am not discovering fire here; Third Way made the same point in early 2007 (page 7). A shrinking middle class is only a problem if it reflects fewer people reaching the middle class.

The post is excellent throughout and it contains many more points of interest.

Daniel J. SmithSent via mobile phone
Assistant Professor of Economics
Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy
137 Bibb Graves Hall
Troy University
Phone: 334-808-6485
Email: smith.dan.j
Website: http://www.danieljosephsmith.com

Top 500 U.S. Manufacturing Firms Had 2011 Sales of $5 Trillion, Almost As Much as Japan’s GDP

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Top 500 U.S. Manufacturing Firms Had 2011 Sales of $5 Trillion, Almost As Much as Japan’s GDP

IndustryWeek recently released its annual ranking of the 500 largest publicly held U.S. manufacturing companies in 2011 based on sales revenue, and the top ten U.S. manufacturing industries are displayed above. Here are some factoids:

1. The combined sales revenue (including global sales) of the top 500 U.S.-based manufacturing for 2011 was $5.13 trillion, which was a 12.75% increase over 2010 sales of $4.55 trillion. To put it in perspective, that amount of annual revenue ($5.13 trillion) of the 500 largest U.S.-based manufacturing companies was almost as much as the $5.8 trillion of GDP for the entire economy of Japan in 2011 (world’s third largest economy).

2. The sales revenue from the top ten manufacturing industries totaled $4.13 trillion in 2011 (see chart above), which was more than Germany’s entire GDP of $3.6 trillion last year.

Daniel J. SmithSent via mobile phone
Assistant Professor of Economics
Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy
137 Bibb Graves Hall
Troy University
Phone: 334-808-6485
Email: smith.dan.j
Website: http://www.danieljosephsmith.com