we are back now with thomas herschel of cornell university and robby hilton smith with dimos.or herschel, politicians, it's a common place where politicians to campaign talking to and promising things to the middle class and if we start to think of ourselves in a different way and something closer to the numbers will politics have to change? >> i think so, ray. i think you are raising an important point. one of the very, i think, interesting findings of the pew studdis that correct people with a high school degree have lost a lot of ground over the last 40 years. we find the same thing in our study which is also of the same period of time, looking at longitudinally looking at the same families over time, that, and this is poignant for white americans who graduated with a high school degree and the baby boom generation now find their labor market tremendously eroded, and that is a group that is experiencing very serious downward mobility i think there was recently al report that talked about higher mortality, lowered life expectancy for a set of white americans who aren't educa

. >> robbie hilton smith, same question. >> yeah. think there is a lot of variability even with those broad categories pew has. what their numbers say is it is a certain band around the median income, two-thirds to 20%s meian income. so, you know, that tells you as to whatever it is, it doesn't really have as much. let the middle, forget how secure you are, you know, so even though numbers are adjusted for inflation, there are certainly a number of other costs that inflation doesn't fully take into account the number of other shifts. >> are black americans or white americans doing even the same as upper income, lower income, middle income, really different accumulating wealth in different ways even though their encloses report that they are roughly at about same? >> yes. certainly. we know from the wealth numbers that the wealth of african-americans, i think there is about a dollar of wealth for african-americans for every $13 of wealth for white americans. right? lagging behind those white americans and they took, you know, african