Harvard Economist Raj Chetty Creates God s-Eye View of Pandemic Damage – Bloomberg
Last month, a couple days after former Vice President Joe Biden selected California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, Chetty briefed the pair over video, presenting data that demonstrated lower-income workers were bearing the brunt of the Covid recession. His chart showed that by April, the bottom quarter of wage earners, those making less than $27,000 a year, had lost almost 11 million jobs, more than three times the number lost by the top quarter, which earn more than $60,000 annually.
By late June the gap had widened further, even though many businesses had reopened. In fact, the segment of Americans who are paid best had recovered almost all the jobs lost since the start of the pandemic. The recession has essentially ended for high-income individuals, Chetty told Biden and Harris. Meanwhile, the bottom half of American workers represented almost 80% of the jobs still missing.
Even as the better-off watched employment rebound and the stock market surge, the virus s economic devastation was all around them, in shuttered restaurants, hair salons, and gyms. It was no longer possible to ignore the economic chasms that separated people who used to live and work alongside one another. That creates this very local feel to the recession, Chetty says.