Index of Systemic Trends 2024
This is the second edition of our Index of Systemic Trends for the United States. The trends considered include poverty, wealth inequality, racial wealth inequality, income inequality, wage stagnation, the cost of higher education, homeownership, corporate taxation, taxation of the rich, labor union density, incarceration rates, healthcare costs, climate change, and life expectancy, among others. We also examine the increasing financialization of the U.S. economy as a key driver of many of our economic outcomes, especially inequality.
The Index of Systemic Trends seeks to offer a “snapshot” as to the performance of the U.S. political economy as a whole over time. It is designed purely to be illustrative of what, we believe, is an important observation: that our current political-economic system is consistently failing to deliver improvement and/or competitive results compared to other advanced economies across a variety of different measures; and that this is indicative of a systemic crisis – and of the need to move in the direction of a new system that can and will produce better outcomes.
All in all, the dashboard warning lights are still blinking insistently across much of this second edition of the Index of Systemic Trends, emphasizing the ongoing systemic nature of the crisis we are facing in America – one that has been building over many decades, and has largely continued to do so over the past five years.