But how so dishonest, Joanna? Doug says my comparison of 1975 with 2007 is unfair because 1975 was the low point of a recession. But it was he who introduced 1973 as the high point of working class purchasing power. If you could tell me what was the low point of the recession in the '00s then perhaps I could make a fairer comparison.
I had thought that Andie and Doug were saying that living conditions had worsened, so I am pleased that Doug says he means no such thing, and accepts that on the Human Development Index, Life Expectancy, literacy college attendance and the other points I cited that one could show a generalised social progress.
Joanna goes on to write
"I would be curious about James' personal experience and social position that leads him to see nothing but blue skies ahead. I assume that anyone who argues his position must at least be personally profiting from business as usual; so I'm curious James, statistics aside, what leads you to believe that life is so sweet and getting sweeter?"
Which I have to believe is a rhetorical question, since if you really wanted to ask me a question about myself, you would not start by calling me dishonest, or suggesting that I was personally profiting from business.
However, since you do ask, I see that this tax year I declared an income of £13,122, (mostly from teaching and freelance journalism) which is a bit on the low side, but since my daughters were born, I have not worked full time. My wife, of course, earns rather more, but if you'll forgive me, that is her business.
The real answer to your question, though, is this. The experience that shaped my perception of the current economic period, was the previous one. I grew up in the seventies and eighties, when the British economy (and I had thought the American one, too) was marked by recessions, slumps and mass unemployment. Then in Britain we had power cuts, nylon shirts and underpants, three television channels, a war in northern Ireland and a class war in the workplace, you had to wait six months to have a telephone installed and the only computers in the country were owned by Littlewood Pools and the Ministry of Defence, as well as being the size of a room. That was when I learned my Marxism, which seemed a rather good guide to the times.
Like a lot of people, I aimed to analyse the current economic period - I mean the period of moderate growth beginning in 1994 - using the same Marxist concepts. I can recall quoting "the Federal Reserve concluded that the long period of growth was the consequence of wages being held down by 'worker insecurity'" (J Heartfield, 'The economy of Time, Cultural Trends, 43, 2001).
I can recall as well being pretty sceptical about the emergence of the leisure society arguing that 'the net increase in daily leisure time since 1961 is 20 minutes' and that 'Britain's leisure society is strongly weighted towards its leisure class' (Heartfield, Great Expectations: the creative industries in the New Economy).
However, I had to amend the latter view, because the latest statistics available then were 1988, which it turned out was the high point of overtime in the UK, which has been falling since (with a slight rise around 2000-02).
What's more, it never occured to me that you could assert that the consumer boom of the last 15 years had been entirely due to ruling class consumption - and I did not think I had to, since Marx's theory most definitely does not say that consumption of use values falls as capital accumulates, but the opposite.
Finally, following lbo-talk for some years now I had assumed that the frequent posts on Americans excessive consumption of the world's resources meant that, like Britain, the US had seen a boost in consumption across the board.