Restoring the link between growth and the living standards of middleand lower-income families was rightly a focal point of both this and the last US presidential campaign. Now, as the President is sworn into office, the task of seeing through the promise of creating economic security for middle-class America, and reconnecting growth to the fortunes of ordinary working families, must remain at the top of his agenda. Given its centrality to the political economy of both the US and the UK, this issue must define much of politics and policy for the next four years and beyond.

The backdrop is a bleak one, in part because of the depths of the Great Recession. But this doesn't provide anything like a full account. The middle-class families talked about so passionately during the presidential campaign have been going backwards for a generation. For them, the recession was just a deepening of a problem that had been growing for decades. As Larry Mishel and Heidi Shierholz demonstrate starkly in the first chapter of this collection, the early baby boomers born in the decade after the end of the Second World War were the last cohort where the typical family achieved higher living standards than their parents’ generation.

A less dramatic but still worrying story has been unfolding in the UK. Typical wages have been flat or falling for nearly a decade. Home ownership has moved out of the reach of a fast-growing swath of the working population, and rents are climbing fast. Less than half of employees are in an employer pension scheme, falling to less than a third in the private sector. A worryingly high proportion of households are already paying such large chunks of their income to meet mortgage costs that they risk going underwater when interest rates eventually return to normal levels. Overall, low- to middle-income Britain finds itself in a highly precarious economic position and forecasts indicate a gloomy decade ahead.

Of course, some things get lost in translation in any comparison with the United States. The US middle class has always had a hazier and more inclusive feel, lacking the social affectations and exclusivity that the term is freighted with in the UK.