Annie Lowrey: The inflation gap

There was a queasy, strained, contradictory, tragicomic feeling to financial life in this decade. Blame it on “late capitalism.” Occupy activists and lefty publications like Jacobin recently popularized the term, borrowed from academia. Marxists used it to denote the globalized, industrialized economies of the postwar period. Literary critics like Fredric Jameson used it to describe postmodernism in economic form, the collapse of high and low, the commodification of everything. It is now a catchall lament for an economy that delivered a record-smashing bull market for the wealthy and the second lost decade in a row for working families.

Looking at the headline numbers, the decade went so well. The Great Recession officially ended in mid-2009, just after President Barack Obama took office, and the economy has not stopped growing since, expanding through the Eurozone crisis and the taper tantrum and the debt-ceiling crisis and manufacturing downturn of 2016. The current expansion is now the longest in modern American history, extending for 10 and a half years and counting. The S&P 500 has tripled in value over the past decade. Corporate profits just keep climbing. American businesses are sitting on a $2 trillion pile of cash.

But scratch the surface, and there is ample weakness. Annual GDP growth continued its long-term secular decline in the 2010s, meaning that the economy piddled along instead of really booming. Productivity growth—the crucial determinant of rising living standards in the long term—was abysmal. The country’s output grew mostly because its workers did more work, not because businesses became more effective and efficient and ingenious.

In many ways, the American economy became more sclerotic. Corporate concentration increased, with more industry sectors dominated by a small handful of firms. All the stories about the furious innovation coming from Silicon Valley and other tech-dominated regions aside, the start-up economy continued its long, slow collapse. The number of IPOs has fallen, and there are now half as many publicly listed businesses as there were in the late 1990s. Our cultural obsession with start-ups peaked at a time when companies under a year old were half as common as they were 40 years ago.

Annie Lowrey: The next recession will destroy Millennials

In household terms: The rich had it great, growing richer than they have ever been and accounting for a greater share of American wealth than at any other point since the Gilded Age. The gaps between the 10 percent, the 1 percent, and the 0.1 percent grew. The difference between doctors and hedge-fund managers widened, just as the difference between doctors and janitors did. But everybody in the top 20 percent, roughly speaking, thrived in the 2010s—most of all, the richest of the rich. The country got its first centibillionaires.