The last Boston Indicators Report, published in 2007, invoked the shared character in the Chinese words for “crisis” and “opportunity.” Two years later, Boston and the nation entered a period of crisis and opportunity squared.

In the final quarter of 2008, the US economy, already in mild recession, fell off a cliff as the overpriced, overbuilt and over-leveraged housing market imploded. Sharply declining mortgage-backed securities brought banks around the world to the brink. The US GDP contracted by a record 6.3% and a subsequent pull back in consumer spending triggered steep job losses and the worst global downturn since the Great Depression. Between October and December 2008, Massachusetts lost almost 50,000 jobs.

While the Commonwealth has fared better than most states since then, the collapse revealed deep and troubling vulnerabilities and disparities: 

• The US now ranks as the most unequal Western industrialized nation. Among all nations, it ranks alongside Morocco,Tunisia, Georgia and Turkmenistan on the global Gini Index of Income Inequality.
• In household inequality,Massachusetts ranked 4th among all states in 2007, and in 2008 tied with Tennessee and Florida behind NewYork, Connecticut,Mississippi, Louisiana,Texas and California.
• Of the 12 Massachusetts counties, Suffolk County, which includes Boston, had the highest level of income inequality in 2008.
• Of the 50 largest US cities, Boston ranked 8th in inequality after Miami, Atlanta, New Orleans, NewYork, Dallas, DC, and LA in 2008.

These statistics reflect both recent national policies and global trends. At the local level, they create a gash in the social and economic fabric as the accident of birth plays a more and more powerful role in the quality of daily life and in key health, education and economic outcomes.

Boston is uniquely blessed with assets that allow it to hold its destiny in its hands, even in periods of change, and to reinvent itself while transforming the world. That is not a grandiose illusion: In every century since its founding, Greater Boston has been the birthplace of a revolution—the American Revolution, America’s Industrial Revolution, the Information Age.

Today, the nation and the world face an undeniable period of crisis and opportunity—a “bottleneck for humanity” in the words of Harvard biologist E. O.Wilson—in terms of the scope and scale of global challenges. At home, the time has come for Bostonians to heal a growing economic divide in order to lead the way forward again.