The yield on a 10-year Treasury bond — that is, the interest rate the government pays when it borrows money for 10 years — is below 2 percent. Interest rates tend to move together, so this also means that the interest rate you pay to buy a house — as well as the interest rates you can get from a savings account — are also at record lows. That freaks out a lot of people because they remember the much higher interest rates of the late 20th century and worry that today’s very low rates are a sign that something has gone badly wrong with the economy.

But taking a much longer view suggests a different interpretation. From the nation’s founding until about 1950, interest rates were on a clear downward trend. This makes sense: As society gets richer, there’s more money available to lend, and so the price to borrow money naturally goes down. From this perspective, the high interest rates of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s look like an aberration driven by the unusually high inflation of that era. And today’s low rates look more like the resumption of a 200-year trend toward ever-lower borrowing costs. So don’t panic — enjoy your 3.5 percent mortgage.

There’s a lot of concern about the possibility of robots displacing human workers and causing mass unemployment. But this chart from the International Federation of Robotics helps to put those concerns into perspective. It shows that the global supply of robots in 2014 was 229,000. That’s a big jump from the 178,000 robots sold in 2013. But in absolute terms, it’s a tiny number in a world where workers number in the billions. Even if robot sales continue to grow at a rapid pace, it will take many years before there are enough robots to pose a significant competitive threat to human workers.

Image credit: International Federation of Robotics

For the first few decades after World War II, productivity growth and wage growth went hand in hand. Workers produced more and more per hour, and they were rewarded with higher and higher wages. But in the 1970s, this tight connection between productivity and the wages of the median worker started to break down.

Workers have continued to get more productive over the past 40 years. But median compensation — which includes cash income as well as benefits like health insurance — hasn’t kept up. Some of the gap may reflect technical issues with the way these figures are adjusted for inflation. And a large portion of the gap reflects growing inequality among workers. The highest-earning workers have seen their incomes rise along with productivity growth, which isn’t reflected by median income figures. Still, it appears that the traditional link between productivity growth and wage growth is broken.

Wage growth has been weak over the past 40 years, but the trend has been much worse for those without a college degree. In 1979, the typical worker with a college degree earned 38 percent more than a worker with just a high school diploma. By 2014, this college wage premium had risen to 78 percent.

The labor force participation rate measures the fraction of the civilian, non-institutionalized population, age 16 or over, that is either working or looking for work. At the peak of the dot-com boom, this figure reached 67 percent. That represented an all-time high — a high that we haven’t come close to regaining over the past 15 years. Participation in the labor force declined during the 2001 recession and then declined even more dramatically between 2008 and 2010. The result: Labor force participation is now at its lowest level since the 1970s.

That last fact — that labor force participation is at its lowest level since the 1970s — sounds pretty alarming. But it’s helpful to look separately at labor force participation for men and women. The big increase in labor force participation we saw between 1965 and 2000 was driven by women entering the workforce. Meanwhile, the participation rate among men has been slowly but steadily declining for as long as the Labor Department has been keeping statistics. And over the past decade, women have started to behave the same way, slowly reducing their participation in the workforce. So the declining labor force participation of the past 15 years may simply be a natural consequence of a society that keeps getting wealthier.

Lots of people think that America has undergone massive shift in its work culture. We used to devote our careers to a single company, the story goes, but now we’re all free agents switching jobs every couple of years. But this chart, taken from an excellent report by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, shows that this story is greatly overstated. It is true that fewer men are spending their careers at a single company than they did a few decades ago. But few women have ever had that opportunity, and even among men it’s always been atypical.

Image credit: Employee Benefit Research Institute, based on BLS data

As late as 1989, almost 60 percent of teens ages 16 to 19 had a summer job. But teenagers are working less, especially during the summer months. Teen summer employment fell to an all-time low of 31 percent in July 2011. It’s rebounded a bit since then, to 36 percent, but there are still way fewer working teens than there were a generation ago.

This is partly because teens are working less year-round: The number of 16- to 19-year-olds working in February fell from 39 percent in 1994 to 28 percent in 2016. But the fall in July employment — from 54 percent in 1994 to 36 percent in 2016 — has been much bigger.

In 1970, a typical American woman would get married around age 21 and then have her first child a year or two later. Since then, women have been waiting longer for both of these milestones, but the change has been larger for marriage. As a result, the average woman in 2011 was having her first baby a year before getting hitched. Of course, these averages hide a lot of individual variation. In 1970, women without a high school diploma were already having kids slightly earlier, on average, than they got married — but the gap grew to five years by 2010. On the other hand, while college-educated women have been getting married later, the gap between marriage and childbirth has stayed about the same — at three years — over the past half-century.

Image credit: National Marriage Project

The growing polarization of people’s marriage patterns seems to be connected to greater economic polarization. Obviously, it’s inherently difficult — financially and otherwise — to raise a child as a single parent. On the other hand, things have gone pretty well for married couples with both spouses working. Their earnings have continued to rise steadily over the past 50 years, surpassing $100,000 per year by 2015. Of course, the causation could run in both directions: Getting married could provide financial and emotional support that helps people succeed at work, while a challenging financial situation may make it more difficult for people to become and stay married.

Image credit: American Enterprise Institute

In the economic boom of the 1990s, most of the job gains came in less populated areas — like outer-ring suburbs and smaller cities. This seemed to make perfect sense because big cities were already densely populated, leaving little room for further development. But as this chart from the Economic Innovation Group shows, the current economic recovery has turned this logic on its head, with the biggest cities enjoying the strongest job gains.

In a normal, competitive market, the price of a product should rise and fall along with the cost of producing that product. But this chart, created by White House adviser Jason Furman using research by Joseph Gyourko and Raven Molloy, shows that this relationship has broken down in the housing market. Since 1980, there’s been little overall change in average, inflation-adjusted construction costs. Yet housing prices — adjusted for the size and quality of homes — have risen about 60 percent. This likely reflects the scarcity of land in desirable areas as well as housing regulations that have limited the amount of housing that can be constructed.

Image credit: Jason Furman

The housing boom of the 2000s was mostly a boom in the construction of single-family homes — mostly at the edge of urban areas. But demand for these exurban housing developments crashed after 2007, and since then we’ve seen a big shift in housing construction. Today, we’re building fewer than half as many new single-family homes per year as we did at the peak of the housing boom in 2006. On the other hand, construction of multi-family housing has fully rebounded to the levels of the 2000s, and could go even higher if demand for housing in high-density areas continues to grow.

Image credit: Jason Furman

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, America was importing more and more oil and other petroleum products, prompting concerns that the US was becoming “dependent” on foreign sources of oil. These concerns never made a ton of sense given that US allies like Canada, Mexico, and the United Kingdom are major oil producers — and because major oil exporters are as dependent on American money as we are on their oil. But in any event, technological advances such as fracking have dramatically reduced America’s dependence on foreign oil over the past decade. America’s net imports of crude oil and petroleum products declined from 12.5 million barrels per day in 2005 to 4.7 million in 2015.

Image credit: US Energy Information Administration

White workers earn more, on average, than black workers, and this chart shows the cumulative result of that earnings gap over the course of a career. It also shows that — despite laws banning discriminatory practices like mortgage redlining — the wealth gap between white and black families has increased over the past 30 years.

It’s also important to note that things aren’t so rosy even for many white families. Whites’ average savings of $130,000 is only enough to generate retirement income of around $500 per month. And this average is skewed upward by a minority of white families with much more than $130,000 saved, putting them on track for a comfortable retirement. On the other hand, the median white family in 2013 had just $5,000 saved for retirement — meaning that half of white (and nonwhite) families have even less than that. Most of these families will be entirely dependent on Social Security for their retirement incomes.

Image credit: Urban Institute

High-flying technology startups like Uber and Airbnb get a lot of attention in the media, but as this chart shows, startups are becoming more and more rare. Of course, most of these startups are not — and never have been — efforts to create the next billion-dollar technology company. Many are small-scale, local affairs like restaurants, auto repair shops, or IT consulting firms. And to some extent, the decline reflects slowing population growth — with more new people in general, there’s less need for new businesses to serve them. Still, new firms are an important source of new ideas and innovations, so declining entrepreneurship could be contributing to America’s growth slowdown.

Image credit: Inc

http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/10/12933426/27-charts-changing-economy