TheAgitator.com
More on the Middle Class
Monday, February 4th, 2008Seems to be some animosity in the comments section about the Drew Carey video.
Look, the purpose of the video wasn’t to tell middle class people that they’re happy if they aren’t. It was to provide some economical and historical perspective to counter the constant class war message in the media that the middle class is “under attack.” It just isn’t so. Inequality may well be growing, and that may well contribute to the sentiment among many in the middle class that they’re being left behind. But they aren’t suffering, or on the verge of extinction. We’re all much, much better than we were a generation ago. We have more free time. We take more vacations. We have nicer things. We have less to worry about. This was the basis of the great work of Julian Simon.
My friend Will Wilkinson’s work on happiness studies factors in to all of this. We’re hard-wired to be competitive, to want more than the next guy. Back on the grassy plains, the guy with the most stuff got to mate with the best-looking women, and had the most children. My reading of happiness scholarship is that generally speaking, the best predictor of happiness and contentment isn’t overall wealth, but being the biggest fish in your particular pond. We’re wired to measure our worth by looking at the people around us. So you’re better off having the nicest house on a middle-income block than the median house in a high-income neighborhood. That the last century of unprecedented prosperity hasn’t made us significantly happier isn’t terribly surprising. We’re constantly measuring ourselves in comparison to those around us, not to our parents or grandparents. And if everyone is getting better off, everyone is going to continue measuring their self-worth against everyone else. Someone is always going to have the best house on the block, someone is always going to have the second-best house, and someone is always going to have the worst house. So long as there are classes, there will always be class envy. That everyone is getting progressively better off can easily escape our notice.
We could solve class envy, of course. We could end inequality with massive wealth redistribution. History has shown that such policies can indeed make everyone equal–equally poor and miserable.
The point of the Drew Carey video–like Simon’s work–is to pan back a bit, and show that as a whole, we’re doing very well. Life expectancy is at an all time high in America. Heart disease and cancer are on the run. We have more leisure and more fun things to do with that leisure than ever before. World travel is no longer just for the rich–almost anyone can now afford it.
The point is to get people to put aside class envy for a second, and appreciate that trade, markets, and capitalism are making us all better off, even it is making some “more better off” than others. It’s to counter the Lou Dobbses, Hillary Clintons, and Bill O’Reillys of the world, who want to in various capacities seal off borders, restrict trade, socialize medicine, and generally end the very policies that have made us so prosperous, healthy, and long-living. Yes, those policies may well make everyone marginally more equal, but they also slow overall progress, and stop the tide from rising.
Bubbles, foreclosures and other temporary market corrections notwithstanding, things are generally getting better for everyone. It’s important to recognize that, so we can continue the policies that got us here.
love the site radley and i genuinely agree with you most of the time but this reads like joe biden trying to explain what he meant by “clean”
Why Drew is wrong: http://www.geocities.com/thornton_46/jlaws.html?2005
The other important point to note with happiness is that in genetic terms it’s a means rather than an end. Restlessness and discontentment are what drive us to acheive things and so it follows both that people who are easier to please are likely to settle for less and so don’t make the headlines (how many people in Bill Gates’ shoes would have retired at $10M, or $30M, or $100M?).
Because that restlessness is an attractive quality it also feeds into the gene pool and so the idea that having a platform on which we’re more likely to succeed (the modern world) makes us happier before we, as individuals, have succeeded is false.
It’s funny that so many of us aspire to happiness while holding in highest esteem those historical figures that were least happy with what they saw.
It was to provide some economical and historical perspective to counter the constant class war message in the media that the middle class is “under attack.” It just isn’t so. Inequality may well be growing, and that may well contribute to the sentiment among many in the middle class that they’re being left behind. But they aren’t suffering, or on the verge of extinction. We’re all much, much better than we were a generation ago. We have more free time. We take more vacations. We have nicer things. We have less to worry about.
Balderdash!
Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity
As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”
Time Off for the Overworked American
Last year, 25 percent of American workers got no paid vacation at all, while 43 percent didn’t even take a solid week off. A third fewer American families take vacations together today than they did in 1970. American workers receive the least vacation time among wealthy industrial nations. And it is no thanks to the U.S. government –127 other countries in the world have a vacation law. We — the crackberry denizens and Protestant ethic superstars — do not.
Poverty in America Today
The United States is a nation pulling apart to a degree unknown in the last twenty-five years. A decade of strong national economic growth in the 1990s left many of America’s communities falling far behind median national measures of economic health. Despite the investments in transportation and public facilities infrastructures, massive movements of capital and people, and the expectations of most regional economists over the past forty years, the nation’s regional development patterns are becoming more uneven. Income inequality is on the rise. The number of communities falling behind the national economic average is increasing. This tendency has been most pronounced in recent years, when trade liberalization and globalization have greatly opened the American economy.
CEO Pay Soared in 2004 as U.S. Economy Stumbled
Exploding CEO pay is a relatively recent phenomenon in U.S. history. For example, in the 1960s, the average CEO earned around 40 times what the rank-and-file workers earned. Today the average CEO makes over 500 times what the average worker earns. And the gap continues to widen, year by year.
Are you flipping kidding me?
I run a small business(less than 20 employees)in sourtheastern NY, LI, when my workers need to resort to putting their home heating fuel deliveries on their credit cards something is seriously rotten in Denmark.
I could post links to pertinent articles all day long that state, the obvious, the middle-class in the US has been getting a raw deal across the board with regard to income related matters.
Perhaps you and your ilk can climb down from your ivory-towers and take a look?
“We could end inequality with massive wealth redistribution. History has shown that such policies can indeed make everyone equal–equally poor and miserable. ” All the wealth redistribution you can come up with will not make my basketball abilities equal to Dr.J’s, my singing ability equal to Mick Jagger’s, my tree chopping ability equal to Paul Bunyan’s, my aphoristic ability equal to Br’er Rabbit’s. Give every American the same amount of money and within 5 years you will have a re-stratified society.
The trick is not in the re-distribution it is in the force necessary to prevent quality and ability from separating from the rest.
Of course you could use government violence to prevent anyone from being paid any differential. Doctor’s paid the same as bloggers paid the same as CPA’s paid the same as garbage truck drivers paid the same as government functionaries. That might work. At the very least it would guarantee a much smaller population.
It is outrageous that anyone could think that the middle class is less well off than even the recent past.
I will use my brother for an example. He is a non-college graduate who delivers pizzas for a living. His wife is a home health care worker when she is working.
They live with their three kids in a very nice Dallas suburb in a 4 bedroom house with an in ground pool and hot tub in the backyard. They have a big screen TV with Tivo and DirecTV. They regularly vacation in Florida and Colorado. They drive decent cars, mostly to the kid’s soccer games. They have several home computers with high speed Internet access and Xbox Live.
Growing up 35-40 years ago, we never came close to that lifestyle, even though both our parents were college graduates and our father worked a professional job with a well established company.
Thank you, Drew Carey, for the excellent video.
“Let none prosper and all stagnate — there’s equality in stagnation”
-Ellsworth in The Fountainhead
Ah, look at the ‘big picture’, they say. Don’t look at yourself and your own financial situation, that what used to be manageable payments have become increasingly unmaneagable, and that foreclosure? Why, that’s a petty point, because our food and cell phones are cheaper! And just look at these kids in boats and big expensive trucks, why…surely there’s nothing wrong!
I’ve liked Carey’s vids so far, but this new one just begs Moore to show him how it is done properly.
One of the tricks that the politicians and Dobbses of the world use is to talk about “anxiety.” (With regard to food, they call it “insecurity.”) That came up in the TV clips in the Drew Carey video. The great thing about it is that it doesn’t have to mean anything at all. You could be making $100,000/year, and even the demagogiest demagogue couldn’t convince you that you weren’t — but he doesn’t have to! He can just convince you to be afraid. You’re not well off, even though you’re making six figures, because you’re afraid you won’t be, some day.
We see this all day long. With health care, they don’t tell you the number of people who don’t get health care; they tell you the number of people without health insurance. Why? Because even healthy people can be scared by that, and there are a lot more healthy people than sick people.
It’s about fear.
An article from this week’s BusinessWeek starts to question the accepted orthodoxy about free trade.
http://tinyurl.com/32q6u8
GAINS ONLY FOR A TINY SLICE
No one is suggesting that trade is bad for the U.S. overall. According to estimates by the Peterson Institute and others, trade and investment liberalization over the past decades have added $500 billion to $1 trillion to annual income in the U.S.
Yet concern is rising that the gains from free trade may increasingly be going to a small group at the top. For the vast majority of Americans, Dartmouth’s Slaughter points out, income growth has all but disappeared in recent years. And it’s not just the low-skilled who are getting slammed. Inflation-adjusted earnings have fallen in every educational category other than the 4% who hold doctorates or professional degrees. Such numbers, Slaughter argues, suggest the share of Americans who aren’t included in the gains from trade may be very big. “[That's] a very important change from earlier generations, and it should give pause to people who say they know what’s going on,” he says.
I think the next ten years are going to show that globalization and free trade, while a net positive perhaps, have been highly overrated.
I thought the video was spot on. People are being ’squeezed’ by their own choices. The only reason to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ is because you want to. “The American Dream” hasn’t gotten harder to accomplish, it’s inflated itself. Sure, the basic tenets are the same: owning a house, owning transportation, getting an education, maybe having a TV. But the details have changed.
The house has grown from a 2 bedroom, one bath small house to a 4-bedroom with 2.5 baths. The transportation has gone from the family car to having at least one car for every driver in the household. The education has gone from going to public school and graduating high school to getting into a ‘good college’, where prices are inflating tremendously for no good reason. And where we used to have the family TV set, now we have TV’s for everyone, with the big-screen in the living room for events (remember, 20″ used to be a ‘big screen’).
All those changes are because of choices people make. You can justify them however you want. “We *need* two vehicles because we both have to work.” “We *need* a bigger house.” But the bare fact is that the scope, if not the items, has changed significantly. And that ANYONE can keep up with this stuff, much less most people (and yes, most people do, no matter what the doomsayers complain) is due to the increases in productivity. People ARE better off.
As for the mandated vacation and all that crap: if you want more vacation, then take it. What you want is more time off with the same amount of pay. How’s that work? Why should someone be forced to GIVE you that. Who’s gonna make up that difference? It’s easy to say ‘the boss’ should, but why?
PNG, how many of your employees have canceled their cable TV or cell phones for the winter to pay for their heating oil? What’s ‘rotten in Denmark’ is that they want something for nothing.
If anybody in the middle class is struggling financially I can point to a few reasons why. 1. They dropped a bunch of money on a newer car 2. They had kids before they were ready financially 3. they go out to eat far too often 4. they buy crap they don’t need and then put it on a credit card. Granted there are exceptions but 90% of people are struggling for the above reasons. And don’t act like that’s not the fucking case.
Radley, I don’t think the video really nailed the points you’re talking about here. Drew covered them, but the piece had too many distractions. For every guy with a boat or a motorcycle, you could find someone else with the same job who just lost his home.
The real case to be made is statistical, and that’s tricky to do in a video. It’s also controversial, because by some measures wages haven’t gone up, and statistical controversies are even more boring.
I hate to be one of those people who only comments when they disagree, but that’s just a testament to how much I appreciate the rest of work, I guess, Radley.
Rising income inequality matters because it effects the bargaining position of the average person. And all these people with lots of STUFF doesn’t in and of itself equal a better standard of living. They’re probably in debt up to their eyeballs like most Americans, and this growing debt is eating away at people’s independence and ability to control their futures. No doubt Fed monetary policies have a lot to do with the middle class’s access to more consumer goods, and the cheap, fiat financing to fund it. But when a large, monopolistic central bank makes decisions that bails out corporations and banks and dishes out cheap money out of thin air for banks to markup and sell to people, that’s just the free market in action, eh?
Taste the difference: http://leftlibertarian.org
“Look, the purpose of the video wasn’t to tell middle class people that they’re happy if they aren’t. It was to provide some economical and historical perspective to counter the constant class war message in the media that the middle class is “under attack.” ”
He should’ve made that more clear in the video. Sorry Balko, but this was definitely Drew Carey’s worst work so far.
All I know is I want Tom’s brother’s life. Maybe not his debt load, but his life.
You’re making some bad assumptions - at least for some of us.
My complaint is not that I don’t have enough money, or even that I don’t make enough money. I’m not after anyone else’s money, and I’m not even saying I’m not happy overall. My happiness frankly doesn’t come from how much money I have or how many nice things I have.
My problem is that I’m facing the reality of our country being over 50 trillion dollars in debt, and that every day that passes the money I *do* have buys less.
I’m facing the reality that because it constantly takes more money to buy the same things, my wages are not stagnating, they are actually falling every day, every month, and every year.
So even though I’m actually setting aside money in savings, and have been, (contrary to most) I have to face the fact, that by doing so I’m actually losing money, because inflation is growing faster than my interest - and it is only going to get worse if we don’t fix it.
I’m facing the reality that this “downturn” or “recession” or “hiccup” or whatever pretty word people are putting on it this week is going to be a lot worse than a lot of people are letting on, and I have very little buffer to deal with it.
Thankfully, I have little to no debt to deal with because of the choices I have made or we’d be even worse off. But the debt everyone else is holding that they won’t be able to repay is still going to hurt me. Especially when the government decides to go around bailing people, corporations, and banks out.
I don’t care about owning a boat, or a jetski. I don’t care about world travel. I just want to know that the salary I was more than adequately feeding, clothing, and educating my kids with 3 years ago, that barely covers them now - despite the only change in lifestyle being towards a more conservative and thrifty one - will still feed them three years from now. Today I don’t have that confidence.
Drew might as well have spit in my face with this video, and I (and apparently many other people given these threads) don’t appreciate it. If what he meant is what you said, then again, he did an extremely poor job of communicating it.
[...] to rectify. Radley Balko received such responses when he posted the same video to his blog and offered the following response to his readers: Look, the purpose of the video wasn’t to tell middle class people that they’re happy if they [...]
I thought the DC video was awsome and right on the money.
Having said that I do think I’m taxed too much and spend too much time on my taxes. I also just got a $400 speeding ticket (19 mph over). I get tired of all the time it takes me to figure out my heath insurance stuff. It takes me so long usually I’m no longer sick and don’t have to go to the doctor after I’ve got it figured out. Also how about some middle-class folks figuring out how to do their own taxes. You see them lined up in H@R Block with big smiles on their faces becuase they’re paying 80 bucks to get back $1500 of their own money.