What David Solomon Doesn't See From the Top Floor

Goldman Sachs, the American Standard of Living, and the Numbers That Tell a Different Story

Published May 23, 2026

David Solomon, the Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs, recently offered his assessment of the American economy with the confidence that comes from running one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world. "I keep bumping up against this reality," he said. "Standards of living for a vast majority of Americans are significantly higher than they used to be."

He is not entirely wrong. He is not nearly as right as he thinks.

The aggregate numbers Solomon is referencing are real. Life expectancy, access to consumer technology, infant mortality rates, and the sheer variety of goods available to middle-income households are all objectively better than they were fifty years ago. A smartphone in a working-class pocket today contains more computing power than existed in entire government agencies in 1975. College degree attainment has nearly doubled since 1990, from roughly 20% of Americans to approximately 38% today. These are genuine improvements in material conditions and they belong in any honest accounting.

But the measures that matter most to how people actually experience their lives — housing, healthcare, wages, poverty, education, and the physical safety of their communities — tell a considerably more complicated story than Solomon's view from the top floor of 200 West Street allows him to see.

Start with the productivity-wage gap, which is perhaps the single most important economic fact of the last fifty years and the one most conspicuously absent from CEO commentary on American prosperity. Between 1948 and 1979, productivity and worker compensation grew in near-perfect lockstep — as the economy produced more, workers shared in that production. Since 1979, productivity has grown by roughly 65% while typical worker compensation has grown by less than 18%. The economy got dramatically larger. Most of the gains went somewhere other than wages. If workers had shared proportionally in that productivity growth the way they did in the three decades before it, the median American wage would be roughly double what it is today. That gap — between what the economy produced and what workers received for producing it — is the foundation on which everything else Solomon is missing is built.

Housing is where the gap becomes most visceral. The median home price in 1970 was approximately three times the median annual income. Today it is more than six times. Homeownership — the primary mechanism by which American working and middle-class families built intergenerational wealth for generations — has become structurally inaccessible for a growing share of the population, particularly anyone under forty who did not inherit a down payment. The communities that have been locked out of homeownership have been locked out of the primary engine of middle-class wealth accumulation at precisely the moment when financial assets — the kind Goldman Sachs manages — have appreciated most rapidly.

Healthcare costs have grown at roughly three times the rate of wages since 1980. A serious illness remains the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States — a fact with no parallel in any other wealthy democracy. Childcare now consumes between 20% and 35% of median household income in most American cities, a figure simply incompatible with the one-income household model that defined middle-class stability in the postwar era that Solomon implicitly invokes when he says standards of living are higher than they used to be.

Then there is the poverty data, which is where Solomon's framing becomes arithmetically indefensible. Since 1966, the U.S. poverty rate has fluctuated between 11 and 15 percent — a range it has barely left in sixty years despite enormous growth in GDP and aggregate wealth. In 2024 the official poverty rate sat between 10.6% and 11.5% — meaning that after thirty years of economic growth, technological revolution, and productivity gains, roughly the same share of Americans are poor as were poor in 2000.

But the percentage conceals a population reality that makes the picture worse. The United States grew from roughly 250 million people in 1993 to 340 million today. When the poverty rate holds flat at around 11% while the population grows by 90 million people, the absolute number of people living in poverty increases substantially even as the percentage holds steady. Approximately 37 to 40 million Americans currently live below the official poverty line — tens of millions of additional people who have joined the economy since 1993 and landed in or near poverty rather than in the middle class Solomon describes. The economy more than doubled in size over that period. If the gains from that growth had been broadly shared, the poverty percentage should have fallen significantly. It didn't. The growth went somewhere. Goldman Sachs knows exactly where it went because Goldman Sachs helped route it there.

The geographic concentration of persistent poverty makes the aggregate number even more misleading. About a third of U.S. counties experienced at least one five-year period of poverty rates above 20% over the past two decades. Approximately 85% of the counties in sustained high poverty across all four measured periods were in the South, concentrated in the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia. These are not communities that have seen their standards of living significantly improve. They are communities that have been in sustained poverty for generations, invisible in the statistics that CEOs cite at conferences and that journalists dutifully report without context.

Education is the dimension that should most directly refute Solomon's thesis, and yet it demonstrates the same pattern. Tuition has increased by more than 1,200% since 1980 — roughly eight times the rate of inflation and four times the rate of healthcare cost increases. The mechanism that previous generations used to enter the middle class has become a debt trap for the generation that followed them. Total student loan debt currently stands at approximately $1.7 trillion, held by around 43 million borrowers. This debt load delays homeownership, delays family formation, suppresses consumer spending, and transfers wealth from young working people to financial institutions. As college degrees became more common, employers began requiring them for jobs that never needed them — a credential inflation that forces workers to pay more to obtain credentials that deliver less relative advantage than they once did.

The K-12 picture is equally stark. American educational outcomes have remained largely flat on international comparisons for decades. The gap between schools in wealthy districts — funded by high property tax bases — and schools in poor districts remains one of the most durable structural inequalities in American life. A child born in a wealthy suburb and a child born in a poor rural county or urban neighborhood enter school systems that are, in practical terms, not the same institution at all.

On crime, the standard optimist narrative is that violent crime has fallen dramatically since the early 1990s, which is true and represents a genuine quality of life improvement. But the mass incarceration explosion that coincided with falling street crime represents one of the most significant quality of life catastrophes in modern American history, falling almost entirely on working-class and poor communities. The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any country on earth — more than Russia, more than China. There are approximately 2.3 million Americans currently incarcerated, with another 4.5 million on probation or parole. The communities those people come from have had their social fabric systematically dismantled by a criminal justice system that criminalized poverty and addiction rather than treating them as public health problems.

The opioid epidemic adds a death toll that belongs in any honest accounting of American standards of living over the past thirty years. More than 500,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2023 — a death toll that exceeds American combat casualties in every war since World War II combined. The pharmaceutical companies that manufactured the crisis paid settlements that amounted to fractions of their profits. The communities that bore the cost were precisely the ones Solomon is claiming have seen their standards of living significantly improve. McKinsey, a firm whose partners rotate through Goldman's social circles, advised Purdue Pharma on how to turbocharge OxyContin sales in communities already devastated by deindustrialization. The consultants got paid. The communities got funerals.

There is one honest concession worth making. When you use the Supplemental Poverty Measure — which accounts for government benefits like food stamps, housing assistance, and the Earned Income Tax Credit — poverty rates are somewhat lower and have shown more improvement over time. Government intervention has made a measurable difference. But that concession actually undermines Solomon rather than supporting him. The reason those programs exist is precisely because the market economy he presides over does not, on its own, produce the broad-based prosperity he claims exists. The government is patching holes that the economy keeps creating. Crediting the economy with improved standards of living while ignoring that those improvements depend on a safety net that Solomon's political allies have spent decades trying to cut is not an honest reading of the evidence.

Solomon's compensation in recent years has run above $30 million annually. Goldman Sachs paid $5 billion in penalties related to its role in the 2008 financial crisis — a crisis that wiped out more middle-class wealth, primarily through home equity, than any event since the Great Depression. Not a single senior Wall Street executive went to prison for it. The wealth destruction fell on homeowners, pension funds, and municipal governments. The firms responsible were bailed out with public money and returned to profitability within two years.

David Solomon keeps bumping up against a reality. So do the 40 million Americans living in poverty, the 43 million carrying student loan debt, the families priced out of housing in every major American city, the communities still counting overdose deaths, and the workers whose wages have grown at a fraction of the productivity they generated for decades. Their reality and his are not the same reality. The difference is not a matter of perspective. It is a matter of which floor of the building you are standing on.

Sources: Census Bureau Historical Poverty Tables 1959–2024; Urban Institute poverty analysis; Bureau of Labor Statistics productivity and compensation data; Federal Reserve student loan data; CDC opioid overdose mortality data; Goldman Sachs 2008 DOJ settlement records. Solomon quote from public remarks, May 2026.