EPI’s latest edition of The State of Working America (SWA) will be published online in January. In the weeks leading up to the publication, EPI will preview some of SWA’s core research on income, wealth, poverty, wages, and employment. EPI economists also explore trends in class mobility, access to health care, and compare statistics in the United States to other countries around the world.

This week’s Economic Snapshot, Income inequality in dollars and cents, focuses on one of the core themes of The State of Working America, and underscores that the economic distress so many workers are feeling today is not simply a result of the Great Recession, but rather, is rooted in economic policies that began long before the most recent recession. SWA presents a picture of extremely lopsided income in which top earners are seeing so much of the total income growth in the country, that there has not been enough left over for most American families to see anything but negligible growth for the past 25 years.

While EPI has published The State of Working America semi-annually since 1988, the forthcoming online edition will present EPI’s in-depth research, including about 200 charts, tables, and figures, in a searchable and user-friendly format.

Also in January, EPI will publish a State of Working America book, Failure by Design: The Story Behind America’s Broken Economy, by Economist Josh Bivens, that offers a narrative to explain the economic policies that got us to where we are today: not just slowly recovering from the worst recession since the Great Depression, but also with a flawed system that could prevent a majority of workers from reaping the economy’s fruits even when there is a robust recovery.