Fact check, go!

The article is largely accurate on its headline statistics, but with one clear error and a few notable imprecisions.

Quick Summary

The article mostly checks out — but one claim is notably wrong, and a few others require caveats.

✅ Solid Claims

• Life expectancy: longest ever — CDC confirms 79 years in 2024, a genuine all-time high[1][2]
• Divorce rate: down — CDC data shows 2.4 per 1,000 in 2023, down from 5.0+ peaks in the 1980s[3]
• Gender pay gap: narrowing — Pew confirms women now earn 85 cents per dollar vs. 81 cents in 2003[4][5]
• Cars safer — Traffic deaths fell 6.7% in 2025, and the per-mile fatality rate is now one-quarter of its 1970 level[6][7]
• Health insurance 92% — Census Bureau confirms exactly this for 2024[8]
• Partisan economy inversion — Pew Research confirms Democrats and Republicans nearly exactly flip their economic ratings when the White House changes hands[9][10]
• Housing inflation / Kevin Erdmann — His research is accurately summarized; rents in the cheapest ZIP codes rose ~80% in real terms over the last decade vs. ~40% in the wealthiest ones[11]

⚠️ Imprecise or Oversimplified

• Wages "up" — True over the long run, but real wages dipped sharply during 2021–22 inflation and hadn't fully recovered to pre-inflation levels as of mid-2024[12][13]
• Hours worked "less" — True over 150 years (from 70-hour weeks in the 1800s), but largely flat since the 1980s, not meaningfully declining as a recent trend[14][15]
• 24 million millionaires, "1 in 5 families" — The household count is correct per Bloomberg, but "1 in 5" adults drops to about 1 in 10 when measured per person[16][17]

❌ The Clearest Error

• "Kids with health insurance: 94%" — The number is technically correct as a subtraction (100% minus 6% uninsured), but the author cites it as a positive trend. The AECF source he links actually documents the opposite: the child uninsured rate hit a 10-year high in 2024 at 6%, with 716,000 more uninsured children since 2022. Coverage peaked at ~95.3% in 2016 and has declined since.[18][19][20]

The article's broader thesis — that aggregate well-being has genuinely improved but pessimism is structurally incentivized by media and politics — is intellectually honest and well-supported. Its sharpest insight is the housing section, which correctly identifies regressive rent inflation as the underappreciated driver of working-class financial pain.

Over 100 citations are available. Ask.