You are invested in the stock market or you are not.
That is the real "two Americas."
In real dollars the median compensation of men (including benefits) is down slightly since 1973 while US productivity has increased 80%.
Income inequality has tracked the stock market, taking off like a rocket at 1980.
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The Whole strength of the economy was diverted from wages to corporate profits. (What stocks represent.) This fueled stocks as a generation-long fun-ride that continues to this day.
Higher earning workers were able to put significant investments in the market. Lower wage workers were not, since they work for subsistence.
As wages stayed flat and the market went wild the higher income workers pulled away from the lower paid workers, both in net worth and in compensation. (Many of the higher paid employees were in finance, which was not a big sector of the US economy before 1980 but has become one of our largest sectors of GDP since then.)
There are two very different stories from 1980-2012 and the best way to separate the have and have nots during that time is "Were you in the market?"
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