I continue to struggle to understand the attention given to relative measures of well-being compared to absolute measures of well-being. If everyone's wealth doubles tomorrow, this chart will not change at all. There is an acknowledgement in paragraph 8 that "middle class ... median income, adjusted for household size, has risen over the long haul, increasing 34% since 1970" but this good news is necessarily moderated by the gloomy observation that middle class median income "has not kept pace with upper-income households." Who cares? Would any members of the middle class be better off if all those upper-income households vanished? The "34%" is important as it is adjusted for inflation and household size. We often see factoids claiming that things were better back then, but even if this number were 0% it would show that things were not better. Things are better now. And income measures ignore the much greater variety of things we can spend income on today, many of which are less expensive and higher quality as well, from vegetables to automobile safety (updated link to video). Controlling for household size is important because "average household size in the United States decreased from 3.2 persons in 1970 to 2.5 persons in 2015, a drop of 21%" according to the methodology.
Both measures may be important. Of course, in terms of wealth, most Americans are better off if you pick a long enough time scale. However, wealth is not a perfect measure for quality of life. For example, a car is not the same proposition to me that it was to someone in 1910. For me, having a car is a necessity that borders on being a burden. Do I have a car, or must I have a car? It might be maddening, but the goal posts are always moving and are very much positioned not just relative to 'what once was', but even more by 'what we think ought to be'. It's a good question. There have been studies of wealth inequality that have suggested as much, but the correlation doesn't seem to be a strong one. My guess that it is one factor among many. I doubt that income inequality tends to promote a feeling of well-being for all parties.Who cares? Would any members of the middle class be better off if all those upper-income households vanished?
Another sore spot. I suggest, here and always, that we consider the maximum available range of data. Your phrase is suggestive of someone who says "global temperatures have not risen for ten years."if you pick a long enough time scale
I was making the point that people don't often consider the long arc of historic wealth when it comes to our view of their own. Whether or not people's perception of their wealth, or their absolute wealth matters more seems to be the difference that drives debates around this topic. I don't think a satisfying answer can be found, so both are probably worth worrying about.
Ah, the first world. We are burdened by the necessity of laundering our bed sheets so we do not have to sleep with parasites. We are burdened by the necessity of refrigerators so we do not have to worry about eating spoiled food. We are burdened by having to take antibiotics so we don't die of infection. We are burdened by the need to charge our smartphones and pay for data plans so we can use devices that would have made Jules Verne swoon. That automobile which was once a rare luxury item (and before that an impossible fantasy) is now "merely" a safe, efficient, comfortable, and relatively affordable machine that enables you to get to your climate controlled, 9-to-5 workplace without breaking a sweat. Is there anything in the big picture that should not lead to cries of joy and gratitude from almost everyone? There's one thing... Let's ignore the lack of hard data and assume that the correlation is strong. Therefore, the evil consequence of the poor getting richer and the rich getting richer at a different rate is that some people's feelings might get hurt. This is the very proof of progress, that the goal posts keep moving in the same direction. It's understandable that people's feelings are not based on the long, global view. But when we step back and talk about the subject, I think we should try to be more objective and recognize the positive trends in measurable life quality factors. As for feelings, the Easterlin Paradox is an area of active research.For me, having a car is a necessity that borders on being a burden. Do I have a car, or must I have a car?
I doubt that income inequality tends to promote a feeling of well-being for all parties.
the goal posts are always moving
I mean, I don't disagree with you, but This changed when we changed the way we built our cities (as well as their outlying areas) so that it became necessary to own a vehicle to access many basic services. You need to consider real life applications. I live in a place where, to get to my 6 am start prep cook and baking job I'd have to walk two hours, and there is no such thing as bus service. add another two hours to walk home and I've spent 10 hours of my day at work and in travel to and from it. Compare that to 6 hrs of work plus 15 total minutes of travel (I live on a rural highway, speed limit 80Km/50mph), having a car means that I can do things like Teach music lessons after work to supplement my income. Owning a car also means that I can get into the closest major city for my appointments with my Hormone Doctor, or crazy thought, actually be able to go to my local doctor without taking a day off of work because of travel time (I'd estimate 2.5 to 3 hours to get to the doctor from where I live). Even if the Greyhound DID stop off the highway in the town I live (it doesn't), I'd still have to take two days off of work for the appointment and travel . I'd love to live in the city and have access to all these things via bus service and walking - but I can't afford it. I currently live in my parents' basement in Rural Ontario, trying to save money to go back to school. I'm not even that rural. I'm an hour outside of a major city. If I lived further out, it would be even worse. But even living in cities can pose problems, when they're designed with cars in mind. I lived in Akron, OH, for my MMus, and while i was a 3 minute walk from the hospital, I was an hour round trip walk from the closest grocery store - Busses existed, but were infrequent to the point that they were neglible. Suddenly, all of the things you do in a day that take little to no time become all-time consuming when you have to walk everywhere - or even bike everywhere. add and hour to groceries, add an hour to travel to and from university, oops, need to pick up some medication, add an hour to get to the pharmacy. the list goes on. Instead, with a car, it can be 20 minutes round trip to and from university, 15 minutes round trip to and from the grocery store, with a stop on the way home to the pharmacy because seeing the sign on the road reminded me that I needed to pick up my prescription. You're right, cars started as a luxury, and in many ways still are, but they're also a necessity to anyone who lives outside of a major city and wants to even partially take part in "society". At this point I'm kind of rereading this and seeing you're more inferring that we should be... i guess more in awe of what defines a lower or middle class existence, but I guess it's hard to be in awe of things you need to function.That automobile which was once a rare luxury item (and before that an impossible fantasy) is now "merely" a safe, efficient, comfortable, and relatively affordable machine that enables you to get to your climate controlled, 9-to-5 workplace without breaking a sweat.
Yes, your description is evocative and shows that we haven't arrived at a perfect, carefree society. I say that the car is an "option" for you in the sense that you at some point made a decision that life is better -- less difficult -- with a car than it would be without. In the past you would not have had this option because automobiles did not exist. We might have discussed the inconvenience of keeping a horse shoed and fed and healthy, and the problem of feces piling up in the streets. You may be relatively less well-off than many other people today, but you are absolutely better off than almost everyone in the distant past, when many people did not even survive childhood. Of course, it's natural to compare ourselves to more fortunate contemporaries, and the resulting aspiration probably drives a lot of the progress in society. I just find it curious that there seems to be a determination to ignore or even deny this forward progress, and focus on pessimistic measures of human well-being.we should be... i guess more in awe of what defines a lower or middle class existence, but I guess it's hard to be in awe of things you need to function
TRUE. But in fairness, I would likely have not been working as far away from my home as I am now. the small road crossing I leave near would have had a general store, and a church (which still stands, actually - they use it for weddings, but need to bring a generator for power), etc. I wouldn't have been working in the next town over, or 15 km down the road. Now, there's no nearby general store, no post office, and fewer farms, less industry. It's because our society has evolved to take the car into account. People drive into the city for work, people drive to the big box store in the next town, or to the grocery store in the other town that has better prices. Because we've been doing that for 40 years and more, smaller local businesses have disappeared, and if one tried to live without a car in a town like mine now, like one would have 100 years ago, it would be possible of course, but the idea of "leisure time" would become a memory, eaten up by walking 20 minutes to the grocery store, then 20 minutes back, or walking an hour to work, and an hour back. every errand adds more time taken, and you can only do so much at a time because you don't have any way to carry a large amount of stuff. Then also do that in -40 with with a headwind a few times each winter, or in a few feet of snow, or on a +35 C day, or in pouring rain. Modern life does not stop for those things (neither did life 100 years ago, but you probably weren't going as far then) What i'm saying is that it's possible to live without a car outside of major cities, but it is, as a general rule, not realistic. ----- anyways as I said in my first post, I do agree with you that most of what we consider "necessities" today are gravy on top of a life that our great-grandparents would have been gobsmacked at. Cars, however, are not one of those. The advent of the affordable car for everyone changed our society in an irrevocable way - It created suburbs, it created freeways, it changed almost everything.In the past you would not have had this option because automobiles did not exist.
It is true. It is why old folk admonish young folk for fretting over problems that are measurably lesser than those they experienced. An automobile is a "a safe, efficient, comfortable, and relatively affordable machine that enables you to get to your climate controlled, 9-to-5 workplace without breaking a sweat". But it is also the only way that I can get to work, and it costs me significant amounts of money. A car is not all upside. It is a measure of both, and the balance differs among people. When I was an undergrad, if my car broke, I accumulated debt. I could not get to school or work without one, and I could not afford one that wouldn't break. It wasn't a clear source of well-being. On its face these lesser problems might seem ridiculous, but they aren't easily dispelled. We are not wholly rational beings.Therefore, the evil consequence of the poor getting richer and the rich getting richer at a different rate is that some people's feelings might get hurt.
I have a dream of one day not needing a car for work. Which, obviously, involves moving into a city where I could either walk, bike, or take public transit. Good luck doing that anywhere else, and if you go for it you'll probably end up paying a lot more for rent or what have you. It's a no win situation but it puts less pollutants in the atmosphere, at least. One day.
Been a conversation for a long damn time. "What the honorable member is saying is that he would rather the poor were poorer provided that the rich were less rich." - Margaret Thatcher.
Before we declare that the sky is falling, let's point out that my ass, with my '95 Dodge Stealth, Afghani daycare provider and wife with $200k in student loans is considered "upper class" by their calculation. Fuck yeah we'd be living like kings in Chillicothe OH but we don't. We moved back to a place where a 1300sqft rambler from 1952 sells for $350k, which saved us a lot of money because our former next-door neighbors spent $850k on an 1100sqft 3BR so their three kids could have two bedrooms and a postage-stamp-sized yard across a 4-lane road from a cemetery. They're schoolteachers. Fuckin' living wage in Los Angeles County for a family of 3 is $49k a year. According to Pew that's $8k into middle-class. According to MIT that's the bare minimum to avoid food stamps. I think Pew can fuck off.
If we're defining two people who combined make $100k as upper class, then there is something seriously wrong with the government's definitions. Two barely-above-entry-level-college-grads are squarely not in the upper class. Maybe we need to redefine what middle income is based on purchasing power rather than percentages of the median. Percentage of the median is meaningless unless we know something about the distribution. This measurement seems arbitrary, and doesn't jibe with reality.
Yes. However, the 'take away' isn't simply that fewer people are middle class because more people are upper class. It's important to note that as the aggregate income shifted from middle to upper class, the middle class demographics have changed. This graph illustrates the point: The upper class has grown, but the middle class has not simply decreased in number, but also in wealth.
Here's another take on the Pew data: http://fee.org/anythingpeaceful/3-charts-on-the-disappearing-middle-class/ It points out that the middle class count dropped from 61 to 50 percentage points, losing 11. Four of them dropped to lower tiers, seven rose to higher tiers. "The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground" sounds inappropriately pessimistic. It also reproduces a graphic from a Carpe Diem post which shows long-term growth in the $100K+ households while poorer brackets get smaller. Carpe Diem had an almost identical response to an almost identical Pew report a few years earlier.
Here's an analysis that purports to explain the phenomenon as a demographic artifact: Solving the Mystery of the Disappearing U.S. Middle Class From the PEW report: Political Calculations confirms that the aging boomers are enjoying high incomes. Generation X is also doing well, but this was a smaller cohort, as shown in another chart. The Millennials are another large group, but they are just starting out and their incomes are still relatively low. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1eXQAKUT7zE/Vml0RDywRZI/AAAAAAAAMyg/pLOmJSqoTnw/s1600/us-registered-births-1909-2004.JPG So the evaporation of the middle class may be explained by many boomers doing well and getting Social Security on one end and many young people starting out their careers on the other end.The biggest winners since 1971 are people 65 and older. This age group was the only one that had a smaller share in the lower-income tier in 2015 than in 1971. Not coincidentally, the poverty rate among people 65 and older fell from 24.6% in 1970 to 10% in 2014.
I see three potential caveats with this explanation. 1) The author here uses registered births. This chart, which would include immigrants (about 42M individuals, or 13% of the population) looks less dramatic: 2) The PEW data showed that 65 and older had a 24.6% increase, but that age excludes most of the baby boomer population (those 51-64) as defined by the generational graph. The PEW data shows that 45-64 yos had a 2.1% increase and 30-44yos had a 0.1% decrease. 3) Did Social Security really push significantly more middle class baby boomers into the upper middle class ($126,000 to $188,000 year) than it kept from falling into the lower middle class in addition to pulling lower middle class baby boomers into the middle class? Because only then could it be attributed to shrinking the middle class contribution for that generation.
These are good points. 1) Of course we should count all living residents. Births is a distortion not only because it leaves out immigrants but because it leaves out deaths as well, which certainly affected the older group more. 2) Another good catch. 3) Social Security is a strange justification for high earnings. The report measures income, but the usual picture of someone collecting Social Security is a retired person living off of their savings.
I am going to give up and fall back on my initial protest that there are better things to discuss. Think about it scientifically, and ask: What question does this analysis answer? What are we trying to learn? We are not trying to answer any of these questions: Are people doing better or worse today than before? Is life getting better or worse for the poorest people? Are typical individuals in the population seeing improvement? The question we are trying to answer is more like this: How have the membership counts in arbitrary demographic blocs changed over time, relative to each other? We are discussing changes in the shape of the bell curve, while ignoring the fact that the bell itself is moving and growing. As if someone asked you about the home team's season, and you said "compared to last year, they scored more points in the first and last quarters of their games, and fewer near halftime."
As I said elsewhere in this post, IMO both the shape and the place of the bell-curve are probably worth discussing. Personally, I suspect that the shape itself isn't as important as mobility, but that the shape of the curve and mobility may be related at times to different degrees. If there is insult of disparity, then surely the possibility to move from the lower strata to the higher one reduces the sting. And, due to some evolutionary oddity of our brains, a little bit of this goes a long way. IMO the US has long benefited from a worship of economic transcendence. There's that quote (mis-attributed to Steinbeck) that pokes fun at Americans: It's a funny cultural observation, but when your soldiers have irrationally high morale, you win more battles. To be clear, I agree that disparity isn't an injustice; at least I suspect that you don't count it as one. However, I do see an increase in disparity coincident with a decrease in mobility as symptom of something that won't end well. My sense is that due to the influence of money on law, there may be a trend in the US towards systems that preserve wealth and prevent mobility at the expense of a greater economic growth. That is, the change in the shape of the bell curve is slowing its shift to the right. To me, this would be a real concern. Here's a horrible thought: What if the hope of economic mobility is not fueled by an absolute rate of mobility, but instead by the sign of the change in that rate? What if the the shape of the bell curve doesn't matter, but the eventual shape that its current change suggests that does?"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."