Anyone who believes incomes are rising for ordinary Americans doesn’t know the difference between “average” and “median.” The basketball player Shaquille O’Neal and I have an “average” height of 6’2”. Get it? Average incomes are moving upward because incomes at the top continue to soar. Total income, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is also rising, for the same reason. But median income – the income of people smack in the middle – continues to stagnate. And the incomes of everyone in the bottom half continue to fall. It’s time we measured the health of the economy not on the basis of GDP or total income growth but by what’s happening to the median income. Repeat after me: This is not a recovery.

~Robert Reich