The IFS says:

The last decade as a whole was characterised by a very poor performance for average incomes. Between 2002-03 and 2009-10, no single year saw an increase in median income of more than 1.0%.

This reminds us of something I fear is often forgotten - that our economic troubles did not begin with the financial crisis of 2007-08 but rather pre-dated them.

My chart shows this. It shows that firms were loath to invest long before the crisis. Capital spending fell relative to retained profits in the early 00s and stayed very low by historical standards. This reflects the "dearth of domestic investment opportunities" in western economies of which Ben Bernanke spoke in 2005. This is, of course, a cause of the weak income growth of which the IFS speaks; firms' reluctance to spend held down wage and employment growth. The "Great Moderation" might have led to irrational exuberance in financial markets, but it certainly did not unleash a boom in corporate animal spirits and real investment.

In fact, one could argue - as Ravi Jagannathan has (pdf) - that the financial crisis is not the cause of our woes but rather a symptom of this underlying problem. The story goes something like this.

After 1997, Asian economies wanted to run big current account surpluses, either as a policy of export-led growth or in order to rebuild reserves depleted by the 97 crisis. By definition, this meant they were net savers, which put incipient downward pressure upon global interest rates. In a parallel universe, these high savings might have financed a boom in real capital spending in the west. But because firms couldn't see good investment opportunities, this didn't happen.Instead, the lower interest rates fuelled a housing boom and the hunt for yield led to strong demand for mortgage derivatives. These bubbles in housing and derivatives then burst, giving us the crisis.

In this way, we've seen what Marx saw in the 19th century - that a lack of profitable opportunities in the real economy pushes people down "the adventurous road of speculation, credit frauds, stock swindles, and crises."

I say all this as a corrective to a common view on the non-Marxist left - that our economic problems are due to greedy bankers and to austerity. But this is nothing like the whole story. This has been a crisis of real, and not just financial, capitalism - which is why it is so intractable.