Inequality

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Is the American Dream a Noble Lie?

by Elias Isquith on April 27, 2013

topics14-1624James Fallows notes that inequality makes the illusion difficult to maintain, but insists it’s worth believing in the American Dream all the same:

In these circumstances, does it make sense for America to maintain the ideal, or myth, that we are a middle-class society? I believe it does, even though this concept may make it harder for us to perceive or discuss the nation’s genuine and growing inequalities. It remains worthwhile, because most of the elements of middle-class identity encourage traits America needs.

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[T]o be middle class is to believe that any goal should be within reach. Success takes effort, and it depends on luck. But a long string of ascents from middle-class-or-below origins, from the Wright brothers and Henry Ford a century ago to Steve Jobs and Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor in our day, suggests a possibility rare in other societies. We are better off believing that this is still the American way.

Y’ask me? If the Horatio Alger myth of rags-to-riches is all the American Dream’s got going for it, well, it’s in trouble. Because for every Jay-Z there are countless failures or never-trieds, people in circumstances both comfortable and dire. And the one-in-10-million who ascends to unfathomable levels of wealth, she’s still just one out of 10 million. That’s a shitty deal.

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Class War at the New York Times!

by Elias Isquith on April 27, 2013

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So Paul Krugman got a little pink in his latest column:

The austerity agenda looks a lot like a simple expression of upper-class preferences, wrapped in a facade of academic rigor. What the top 1 percent wants becomes what economic science says we must do.

Does a continuing depression actually serve the interests of the wealthy? That’s doubtful, since a booming economy is generally good for almost everyone. What is true, however, is that the years since we turned to austerity have been dismal for workers but not at all bad for the wealthy, who have benefited from surging profits and stock prices even as long-term unemployment festers. The 1 percent may not actually want a weak economy, but they’re doing well enough to indulge their prejudices.

And this makes one wonder how much difference the intellectual collapse of the austerian position will actually make. To the extent that we have policy of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent, won’t we just see new justifications for the same old policies?

I hope not; I’d like to believe that ideas and evidence matter, at least a bit. Otherwise, what am I doing with my life? But I guess we’ll see just how much cynicism is justified.

So there you have it, the New York Times, proclaiming class struggle across the land!

It’s definitely a little weird seeing this in the staid, bourgeois pages of the Grey Lady; her audience tends to be on the wealthier side, after all. But inequality has gotten so extreme that even a goodly chunk of the New York Times’ audience can justifiably feel that they’re on the outside, looking in on — or rather up at — the economic party being enjoyed by the select few.

Earlier in the column, Krugman cites a new paper by Bartels, Seawright, and Page which found that the wealthy’s policy preferences diverge considerably from everyone else’s. They tend to care first and foremost about the deficit — and their preferred solution is cuts, cuts, and cuts; to Medicare, to Social Security, to Medicaid. It’d seem odd if it weren’t mirrored in every way by the national dialogue, where the wealthy’s priorities masquerade as the national interest.

If this doesn’t sound like many people you know — or if you yourself are lucky enough to be financially secure, but still don’t particularly yearn for the return of social contract circa 1896 — it’s probably because you think you’re what the authors would consider “wealthy.” But when they say wealthy, they mean wealthy: the average wealth for those the study categorized as wealthy? Fourteen-million dollars.

And that, friends, is how you get the New York Times to sound like a gateway drug to Pravda. (Except, y’know, not really.)

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Roller Coaster of Inequality

by Elias Isquith on April 24, 2013

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If you haven’t seen it already, do check out this interactive graphic from the New Yorker, which measures the median income of every stop on every line throughout the city. Here’s my line and stop — lowest in Queens! Too proletarian to quit, y’all.

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Thatcher and Inequality

by Elias Isquith on April 13, 2013

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Margaret Thatcher was many things, most of which I would not want to be, but she did have at least one admirable trait: she could be pithy as all get-out. Sometimes she was a little too on-the-nose — “There is no such thing as society” — but many other times she hit the perfect balance between intuition, irony, and ideology.

Her famous claim that her political opponents on the Left “would rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich” is but one example.

Some variation of that charge — which, I should note, existed in various forms prior to her now-authoritative version — has been levelled against left-of-center types here in the US, too. And usually with great effect. That’s why you’ll hear Barack Obama or other national-level Democrats talk so effusively, often so needlessly, about the wonders of the business class. For the ones who aren’t genuine Fortune 500 sycophants like former Senator Evan Bayh, it’s a case of protesting too much.

But Matt Bruenig, writing in The Atlantic, wants to take things in another direction. In fact, Bruenig flirts with lefty slatepitchery and argues that even if it were true, this idea of lefties supporting relative immiseration as the price of equality, so what? Maybe that’s still, on the whole, for the best:

[T]here is an even deeper flaw with Thatcher’s barb. It presumes that nobody could ever seriously support making the poor poorer in order to make the rich less rich. Admittedly, the idea seems ridiculous on first glance. But there’s substantial evidence that suggests inequality, in and of itself, generates a whole slew of social problems that are harmful to individual and collective wellbeing. It is therefore conceivable that policies that reduce inequality could be worth pursuing even if they leave everyone, the poor included, with less income than they would otherwise have.

Read Bruenig’s piece to get a better sense of the studies he’s citing. Basically, though, what’s happening is that there’s a growing body of research that indicates inequality is not a relative ill for society. It’s just an ill, full stop, no matter how relatively prosperous the society’s economic conditions happen to be.

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