Giving Compass' Take:

· The Brookings Institution launched a new initiative focusing on the future of America's middle class: This discusses how to improve the quality of life and upward mobility, while identifying the core problems.

· How do we define America's "middle class" and who is grouped in that ranking? That could be the most important aspect when it comes to policymaking and outreach.

· Read the policy wish list for America's middle class.

Here are seven reasons we are worried about the American middle class:

  1. Middle Class Incomes Are Stagnant — Despite gains in national income over the past half-century, American households in the middle of the distribution have experienced very little income growth in recent decades.
  2. Employment And Wages Are Declining — The retreat from work among less-educated prime-age adults, especially men, is well-documented. One reason for these declines in employment and labor force participation is that work is less rewarding. Wages for those at the bottom and middle of the skill and wage distribution have declined or stagnated. The “college wage premium” has flattened in recent years, but workers with a college degree can still expect to earn over 80 percent morethan those with just a high school diploma.
  3. Middle Class Children's Prospects Are Declining — Stagnant incomes and falling wages have meant that fewer Americans are growing up to be better off than their parents. Upward absolute intergenerational mobility was once the almost-universal experience among America’s youth. No longer. Among those born in 1940, about 90 percent of children grew up to experience higher incomes than their parents, according to researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project.
  4. Destinies Are Diverging, Especially By Race — While the mobility and income trends reported are concerning enough, they mask an even more troubling story for Black and Hispanic households.
  5. Place Matters More Than Ever — Place matters. Where you end up depends a great deal not just on your family background and your race but also on where you grew up. The chance that a child born in the bottom quintile will make it to the top quintile as an adultranges from around 4 percent in Charlotte to 13 percent in San Jose.
  6. A Sense Of Well-Being Has Eroded — Most Americans are unlikely to pore over the latest intergenerational mobility statistics. But many are acutely aware that the American Dream is a more distant prospect for today’s children. The share of Americans who are confident life for today’s children will be better than it has been for today’s adults was only 21 percent in 2014, down from one-third in 2007, according to a survey conducted by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal.
  7. Middle Class Families Are More Fragile And Dependent On Two Incomes — Though modest, the improvement in middle-class family incomes over the past several decades is entirely thanks to women’s added work hours and earnings. According to Heather Boushey and Kavya Vaghul at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, were it not for women’s economic contributions, middle-income families would have experienced stark declines in income over the 1979 to 2013 period.

Read the full article about the American middle class by Eleanor Krause and Isabel V. Sawhill at The Brookings Institution.