More Americans lived in poverty in 2010 than in any other time that records have been collected, according to US Census data released yesterday. Median household income fell, too, and a growing number of people are without health insurance.
An additional 2.6 million people became officially poor last year, raising the poverty rate from 14.3 percent in 2009 to 15.1 percent. It was the fourth year in a row that the ranks of the poor grew, and Sawhill predicts poverty rates will rise to 16 percent by 2014.
Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.
In China, it took 15 days.
