Rising living standards are part of the American story. Over the past century, the steady growth created the middle class, defused economic unrest and helped the nation absorb millions of working-class and immigrant families into the mainstream.

Against this backdrop, Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley who studies the risks facing Americans, says he sees a broad decline in the economic security of most Americans.

"The unemployment rate or the inflation rate doesn't capture the degree to which people are at risk of losing their home, or see their finances crumbling, or the risk of high health costs without insurance coverage, or the risk of retiring without adequate income," he says. LINK