>
> What's going on? The other day, the WSJ started a series on class and
> mobility in America, and today the NYT starts one.
"Upward mobility" - what the Hell, are we now in Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, where everyone is above average? If you judge by quintiles, then clearly you are talking a strictly zero-sum game. Gauging by income quintiles, to precisely the same extent that there is this wonderfully desirable upward mobility that the NYT article is so big on, there is an exactly identical amount of downward mobility.
Besides which, why in the world _shouldn't_ the hundred and forty million in the bottom fifty percent of incomes, in this richest country in the history of mankind, get to live a comfortable life? One thing that drives me crazy is reading, again and again and again, the proposition that "you have to have a college degree to live a decent life in America today." Fact is that somewhat more than half of the kids in school will _not_ get a college degree. What are they (we) supposed to do, leave the country? drown themselves? starve? (By (we), incidentally, I mean "me, WDK, and the rest of the non-college-educated Americans," not "we the subscribers to LBO-talk." I'd be very surprised if so many as five percent of us LBOsters are degree-free like me.)
People don't live by quintiles anyway. Over the last forty years _all_ families below the eightieth percentile has gotten a Hell of a lot poorer. True the price of a computer has gone down from $3-million to $299 (while the price of a paperback book has risen from 75 cents to five or six dollars...) But where in 1965 the average family could afford to feed and clothe themselves, live in a house, own a car and the usual array of consumer gad-goes, on the income from one full-time job, now as everyone knows it requires two full-time workers. That's a fifty-percent pay cut for all of us except the privileged few; this at the same time that per-worker productivity has soared. Where did all the wealth go? You could never tell if you look at quintiles, which bunch families with two $75,000-a-year incomes together with multi-billionaires, but it's obvious that all the extra profit extracted from twice as much labor for the same amount of money has ended up in the pockets of the richest one or two percent.
Finally, I suspect the business about "get a college education and live the life of the l33t" is going to turn out to be as much of a fraud as the idea, so popular ten or fifteen years ago, that if you get a degree in Computer Science you'll have a permanent career on Easy Street. First the capitalists spent a couple-three decades exporting all the factory jobs to Asia, while the college-educated upper-middle-class didn't lift a finger - "why help those stoopid hi-skool graduates, if they wanted a respectable life they should have attended college like I did." Now the capitalists are sending the jobs which require college degrees off to India, and the ex-factory class (now working double hours for half-wages at Wal-Mart and the like) are unlikely to mobilize their votes to protect the college-graduate class. They (we) are more likely to laugh and sneer, "Now you snobby college types know what it feels like!" Divide and conquer, "let's you and him fight!" Third-world economy, here we come!
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net