The latest poverty and income figures came out this week, and boy are they disturbing. It’s not so much the headline figures, which have been well covered in the Times and elsewhere: 46 million Americans living under the poverty line in 2010, the highest number since the Commerce Department started collecting the figures back in 1959. That’s a horrible statistic. (Amy Davidson responded on Tuesday.) But it’s not too surprising since we’ve been through the deepest recession since the nineteen-thirties, and getting thrown out of work is a primary cause of poverty. (Plus, the population grows every year. If the proportion of people in poverty stays the same, you’d expect the absolute numbers to grow over time.)

It’s not even the fact that median household income—the income of the American household in the middle of the income distribution—is now back to the level it was at in 1996: about $49,500 in inflation-adjusted dollars. To be sure, that is a very alarming fact. But I think most people have already cottoned on to the idea that we have been through a “lost decade.” To get the picture, you just have to look at the stock market or your last paycheck.

Also, the figures for household income need to be treated with a bit of caution, since they aren’t adjusted for changing family sizes. As time goes on, more people are getting married later or not getting married at all. This means there are more single-income households, which obviously earn less than two-income households. This biases the figures somewhat. (The story of where the poverty line came from and how it’s derived is actually pretty interesting. If you want to read more about it, I wrote an entire magazine piece about the subject back in 2006.) Still, even making the necessary adjustments, it’s pretty clear that the typical American family has made little or no progress since the late nineteen-nineties.

But let’s look at the figures for individuals, which aren’t subject to any such distortions, and to eliminate the effects of the economic cycle let’s go back further than the late nineties. (When economic historians come to look at the period from 2000 to 2011, I suspect they will view it as one elongated period of recessions and subpar growth—the end of the great asset price boom.)

To me, what is really, really alarming is this: a typical American male who works full time and still has a job is earning almost exactly the same now as his counterpart was back in 1972, when Richard Nixon was in the White House, O. J. Simpson rushed a thousand yards for the Buffalo Bills, and Don McLean topped the charts with “American Pie.”

The figures, which appear in Table A-5 at the back of the Census Bureau’s report (pdf), are these. Median earnings for full-time, year-round male workers: 2010—$47,715; 1972—$47,550. That’s not a typo. In thirty-eight years, the annual earnings of the typical male worker, adjusted to 2010 dollars, have risen by $165, or $3.17 a week.

If you do the comparison with 1973 it is even worse. The figure for median earnings of full-time male workers in that year (when O. J. rushed two thousand yards and Tony Orlando had a chart-topper with “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree”) was $49,065. Between now and then, Archie Bunker and Willie Loman have suffered a pay cut of more than twenty-five dollars a week.

Is it any wonder Americans are not as optimistic as they used to be?

One final note: By definition, this is not a new story: it’s been going on for decades. One of the first pieces I wrote for The New Yorker, back in December, 1995, was entitled “Who Killed the Middle Class?” Here is how it ended: “At some point, both parties will have to level with the voters and tell them the truth: the postwar Golden Era is gone forever, and the great middle class has gone with it. This is nobody’s fault; it is just how capitalism has developed. Once this conclusion is accepted, maybe the political debate can move away from mutual recrimination and on to ways of governing a less homogenous and more inequitable society.”

Looking back, I’m not sure about the “nobody’s fault” line. Deliberate policy measures have certainly played a role: opening America’s markets to cheap foreign competition; attacks on trades unions and labor laws; the practical abandonment of efforts to train (and retrain) large swaths of the non-college-graduate work force. But the underlying economic trends remain the same. If anything, they are strengthening.

Illustration by Christoph Niemann.