Wages Are Falling. Wealth Is Surging. No Wonder Americans Are Unhappy.

Two events from the past week help crystallize this strange, contradictory moment for the U.S.economy.On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the surge in energy prices had wiped out a year and a half of wage gains for the average American worker.

On Friday, the public-markets debut of SpaceX made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.That stark juxtaposition helps explain why many Americans, in survey after survey, say they no longer believe the U.S.economy is working for them.

A few people are getting fabulously, unimaginably wealthy at the same time that entire generations of families worry they will never be able to afford to buy a house, raise children or enjoy a comfortable retirement.“I don’t think the stock market is necessarily causing” Americans’ pessimism about the economy, said Stefanie Stantcheva, a Harvard professor who studies public sentiment.“But I don’t think people are looking at it and are thinking, ‘Great, this means I’m going to do very well, too.’ It’s potentially reinforcing this feeling of ‘I’m falling behind.’”Inequality is hardly a new feature in America.

But the explosion of wealth at the very top is without precedent in U.S.history.

At the height of the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, the richest handful of Americans had a net worth equivalent to about 3 percent of the country’s annual economic output, according to data compiled by the French economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez.Today, the fortunes of the same 0.00001 percent — about 20 individuals — make up roughly four times as large a share, equivalent to 12 percent of annual output.Other economists, using different methodologies, come up with somewhat different numbers.

But hardly anyone disputes the basic fact that the wealthiest few have made extraordinary gains in recent years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your pati...