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Job security, with good wages and durable industries. A good education. A home to call your own. Affordable health care when you get sick. A secure retirement even if you’re not rich.

“Job security, with good wages and durable industries. A good education. A home to call your own. Affordable health care when you get sick. A secure retirement even if you’re not rich.”

It is a myth that we are helpless to do anything about the state of the economy. 

Today President Obama will give a major economic address in Illinois, the first in a series of speeches designed to refocus the national conversation on job creation and the struggling economy.

Whatever growth in GDP or reductions in unemployment, most Americans think the economy stinks. According to a new CBS poll, more than 60 percent of people polled rate the economy as "bad." And well they should: For the vast majority of Americans, economic gains during the recovery have almost entirely gone to the people at the very top.

What's the best way to rebuild America's battered middle class: redistribute wealth downward from the top 1 percent? Or grow the overall economy? In fact, both strategies are crucial, but it will be interesting to see which path President Obama stresses tomorrow when he pivots back to economic issues with a major policy address. 

Location, location, location. It’s a real estate cliché, but also, according to a new study by a team of experts from Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley, one of the most important factors for predicting intergenerational economic mobility in America. When it comes to the whether a poor child born in America can climb up from the lowest rungs on the economic ladder, place matters.

A major new study on economic mobility by a team of top scholars has revealed that it's hard to move up the ladder if you're isolated from good schools and jobs. 

What a surprising finding -- or at least it was surprising forty years ago.

At Demos, we are working for an America where we all have an equal say and an equal chance. The slaying of Trayvon Martin has reminded us that we have not yet achieved an America where we all have equal chance to merely live. Trayvon Martin was denied that chance because his identity was one that our society marks, in countless ways each day, as fearsome.