In 1976, Richard Freeman wrote a book called “The Overeducated American.” So many Americans had been getting college degrees that the relative wages of white-collar professionals had started to fall. It no longer paid to go to college and, for most of the ’70s, fewer people did. Just so, incomes of the educated began to rise again.
People like Freeman, a labor-market economist, waited for the cycle to turn. They expected that with white-collar types riding high again, more people would stay in school, and incomes at the top would level off once more.
But they never did. Instead, the rich kept getting richer. Across the spectrum of American society, the higher your income category, the more your income continued to grow. And for a quarter-century, albeit with zigs and zags along the way, that rich-get-richer pattern has held. The figures are striking. In 2004, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest official analysis, households in the lowest quintile of the country were making only 2 percent more (adjusted for inflation) than they were in 1979. Those in the next quintile managed only an 11 percent rise. And the middle group was up 15 percent. Do you sense a pattern? The income of families in the fourth quintile ”” upper-middle-class folks with an average yearly income of $82,000 ”” rose by 23 percent. Only when you get to the top quintile were the gains truly big ”” 63 percent.
Articles like this annoy me. It has two points:
1. the rich are paid too much
2. the poor have too little economic opportunity
Both might be debated fairly, but discussing inequality as if it is an integral issue ignores the fact that these two points are caused by two separate sets of reasons. So the article talks about one issue set and then the other without concluding cogently on either. At the end of it, I’m not sure that inequality is bad or good, based on this article’s reasoning.
Of the two points, I think that #2 is by far the most interesting. The rich being rich seems like a fulfillment of capitalist economics, combined with republican democracy and its inherent political compromises on the tax codes. Concerning the poor though, the author addresses some good issues towards the final paragraphs. But he never comes to any conclusions besides more money: more government school money for teachers, more money for student loans, more nurturing (whazzat?) which would presumeably cost more money as well. Well, perhaps money is important, but we will have to be more explicit than the likes of “nurturing” to decide on how the infrastructure of our nation is deficient.
Let’s look at this historically. A century ago a very significant issue in the US was low agrarian literacy rates and economic opportunity. The social response was to dramatically raise the quality of school, economic, and social infrastructure (such as roads and rural electrification). There were also dramatic improvements in rural governance, leading towards local governments or state agencies that could marshall the resources to address these problems. This led towards large numbers of Americans leaving the agricultural sector. But economically, that was a very good thing. Now rural America is poorer than urban or suburban America, but not nearly as much. The author comes nowhere close to addressing his problem subject in any such cogent terms.
The rich are getting richer. So what? The poor are not getting poorer. Meanwhile incentives for achievement are getting stronger. That’s one of the things that is fueling economic growth overall. That, and information and computer technology and its complementarity with human capital. Shall we turn back the clock and not invent the computer? I don’t think so. The message? Stay in school and take personal responsibility for learning. There is public education afterall. And, parents, if public education stinks, complain. And vote.
The rich are getting richer. So what?
so what ?
as nouwen was fond of saying:
our savior choose powerlessness over power, vulnerability over defensiveness, dependency over self-sufficiency
And there is abundant evidence that ever-widening gaps between rich and poor are bad for societies because they degrade and alienate. It has certainly happened in the UK these last decades: people here don’t think it applies to the US too?
The poor in this country still live at a level higher than that of most of the middle income in most other countries. Where else can you think of where a person can drive up in their Cadalliac to pick up their food stamps, then go home and watch tv. the Soviet Union is reported to have filmed a documentary about the poor in America to show their citizens how bad the ‘richest country in the world’ is, but it backfired as the poor in the USSR realized that American poor had access to electricity, cars/transportation, refrigerators, stoves, food, toilet paper, etc. that they had only on ration or could only dream of, and the number of exit visa requests rose.
But seriously, yes, there is a poorest class in the society, but is giving government handouts the answer or should we be funding more vo-tech programs for the poor? If we only focus on government programs such as welfare/food stamps/ etc. the end result will be a permanent underclass, not enabling people to be able to move up and out of poverty situations.
And of course, where is the Church and why have we delegated this duty to helping the poor to the government?
See the thread above entitled:
The Class-Consciousness Raiser
very good companion piece.