It doesn’t hold up. “Over the past 40 years,” Sherk says, “the compensation that companies pay their employees has held constant at slightly over 70 percent of national income, never deviating more than a few percentage points from that number.” It’s been so steady that “in the first quarter of 1968 employee compensation was 69.9 percent of national income. In the last quarter of 2007 it was 70.6 percent.”

Employees are actually doing better, because there’s more money to go around. Our economy has grown by leaps and bounds since the 1960s. And that rising tide has benefited those near the bottom of the economic scale as well as the wealthy.

Yes, unemployment jumped last month to 5.5 percent. But even so, the unemployment rate remains remarkably low by historical standards.

Economic growth can be scary. As new jobs are created, old jobs often go away. But the results are positive. Our economy has indeed lost many low-wage manufacturing jobs, but has created more high-wage jobs in engineering, computer science and nursing.

Things aren’t perfect. There are economic problems in our country today, as there will always be. Americans may well carry too much debt, for example. But we don’t end up in Dickensian debtors’ prisons.

We may act, at times, as if we’re living in “Bleak House.” But the facts on wages and jobs show we should have “Great Expectations” for our national future.