I'm not really an economist. Like many, I just occasionally play one on the blogs. So I don't really have the tools to adjudicate this dispute between Jacob Hacker and the Congressional Budget Office on whether income volatility has increased. Those who can pick their way through the arguments, however, should do so, and report back in comments. As a general point, the Jacob Hacker agenda never struck me as particularly dependent on income volatility, and as a political question, how insecure people feel is actually a much more important determinant than how insecure they are, and my hunch is you'll find a fair amount of variance between those two metrics.
