The slow pace of economic recovery, exacerbated by higher taxes and across-the-board federal spending cuts this year, has soured attitudes among U.S. households. Some 54 percent of Americans say their incomes have “hardly recovered at all” from the recession, according to a September survey by the Pew Research Center in Washington.

Labor Sentiment

Sentiment regarding employment opportunities is similarly bleak, with 52 percent saying the job market has barely recovered since the recession, Pew’s survey shows. Payrolls are still down 1.9 million employees from the January 2008 peak, according to Labor Department data.

Such figures help explain why some Americans are seeking unorthodox ways to supplement their incomes. Hare, who has a 4- month-old son and 7-year-old daughter, researched selling her breast milk online after seeing she could make as much as $5 an ounce.

“These are tough times,” said Hare, who was last employed as a showroom sales manager at a wholesale trade center. “The rich are getting richer and everybody else is losing their jobs and their homes. It’s just terrible.”

Household Income

Median household income, which includes wages and investments, has fallen every year for the past five after adjusting for inflation, according to data from the Commerce Department, with Americans earning less than they did in 1996.

Gains in worker pay have lagged behind the previous recovery. Wages and salaries, unadjusted for changes in prices, have climbed at a 3.2 percent annualized rate since the economy emerged from the recession in June 2009, trailing the 4.5 percent pace in the four years after the 2001 slump.

“If you’ve been unemployed for years, if you’re on food stamps and you’ve had trouble getting by, I can totally see you being very economically desperate,” Colas said. “I don’t think a lot of people sell their kidneys. I do think a lot of people in desperation do that search to say, ‘If worse comes to worst what could I do?’”

While the sale of kidneys is limited to the black market, the organ could fetch $15,200 if legal monetary incentives for donations were introduced, according to 2007 research by University of Chicago economics professor Gary Becker and Julio Elias, then an economics professor at State University of New York at Buffalo.