As a midterm year, election coverage dominated our newspapers for much of the year. That being said, 2022 was also a year full of stories about the U.S. economy. As the world clawed its way out of the pandemic, new trends emerged that revealed how our lives had changed since.
Below are four economics stories that are, in my estimation, among the most important stories of 2022. While we spent a lot of time reading about inflation, a sluggish stock market, and a certain multibillionaire purchasing a specific social media platform, the stories below are about trends that may have an impact years down the road.
U.S. poverty hit its lowest rate on record in 2021
When Congress failed to reauthorize the pandemic expansion of the Child Tax Credit in 2021, we knew low-income households would be in trouble. What we didn’t yet know, though, was how much the child tax credit expansion was helping low-income households. A September data release by the Census Bureau confirmed that the Supplemental Poverty Rate had fallen to 7.8% in 2021, 1.4 percentage points below the 2020 rate.
Government assistance had a large hand in reducing poverty in 2021. The Census Bureau estimates 45.4 million fewer people were in poverty because of government assistance that year than there would have been otherwise. Next year we will have data from 2022 to see what has happened in the face of reductions in assistance for children.
Nationwide math scores down after COVID
An October report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the first national report card since 2019, showed a drop in math scores nationwide among elementary and middle school students. Math scores showed the unraveling of decades of progress in math among U.S. youth, with fourth-grade scores dropping to their lowest levels since 2005 and eighth-grade scores dropping to their lowest levels since 2003.
Reading scores dipped in 2022 as well, though not as dramatically as math scores did. Peggy Carr, commissioner for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers the survey, said that the disruption in teaching caused by the pandemic was bound to hurt math scores more than reading scores. This is because reading is easier to practice at home while math usually needs more hands-on instruction to improve with. Hopefully returning to the classroom will help reverse this trend, though the scars of the pandemic on student learning will likely be felt for decades to come.
Most white Americans now live in mixed-race neighborhoods
In 1990, 78% of white Americans lived in neighborhoods where at least four out of five of their neighbors were white. As of the 2020 census, only 44% did. A November analysis by the Washington Post laid these statistics bare, showing that the percentage of Black Americans living in predominantly Black neighborhoods had also fallen over that period.
A driver of this shift is the migration of Black and Hispanic residents to suburban neighborhoods. Another factor is that America’s white population is shrinking. So the total population is becoming more diverse and neighborhoods are also becoming less segregated. A total of 56% of Americans now live in mixed-race neighborhoods.
US Happiness Report: happiest states in Southeast, least happy in Pacific Northwest
In November, Gross National Happiness USA released the first U.S. Happiness Report, the results of a 50-state survey that asked 5,000 Americans questions about life satisfaction, happiness, anxiety, and the extent to which the things they did in life were worthwhile.
The five highest-ranking states on the life satisfaction measure were Delaware, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, and South Dakota. The five lowest-ranking states were Oregon, Oklahoma, Washington, Rhode Island, and West Virginia. By analyzing state-level well-being, we can start to figure out which policies contribute to happiness and promote policies that help people live better lives.
These were just four stories from 2022. Let’s hope in 2023 that we see progress in poverty, learning, equity, and well-being.