In Barack Obama’s interview with The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, published on Sunday, he attempts to explain his economic legacy. The president begins, tellingly, by making appraisals that no American worker would ever make.



“I actually compare our economic performance to how, historically, countries that have wrenching financial crises perform,” Obama says. “By that measure, we probably managed this better than any large economy on Earth in modern history.”

Unfortunately, workers who haven’t seen a raise in 15 years, and have seen their living standards decline even more rapidly through the last eight, don’t grade on a curve. They don’t compare their plight to Norway’s in the 1980s or Japan’s in the 1990s. They look at their own lives and decide whether or not they’ve improved.

Have they? In the aggregate, yes; we have experienced an economic recovery. But in an age of skyrocketing inequality, we haven’t all felt that recovery. And that makes the politics of the post-Obama age harder for Hillary Clinton and Democrats nationwide.

Pavlina Tcherneva, an economics professor at Bard College, has contributed the seminal chart for thinking about how the U.S. economy works today. In the 1940s and 1950s, income growth after recessions went almost exclusively to the bottom 90 percent of earners. That began to change throughout the decades, until the 2009-2012 period, where more than all the income growth went to the top 10 percent; the bottom 90 percent actually saw their incomes fall in this most recent post-recession period. That’s where it gets so hard to assess the Obama economy: All this upward redistribution means that we can have a recovery without many of our citizens feeling it.