Forced to work for money, Combat! sucks

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment

The free market at work

Remember yesterday, when I said I’d see you today with Friday links? Tough news, champ. The management at Combat! blog loves you very much, but someone bought our time today. You guys know you’re my favorites. But you pay me very little. I must conform my life to those endeavors likely to sustain it, and talking that mess on the old yakbox, as blogging is called, sustains little. It’s probably because my dad isn’t a wealthy blogger, either. The whole blog-based American economy is rigged—a maze with no exit, designed to keep us in roughly the same place we started. If you don’t believe me, ask the Washington Post.

They’re one of several outlets to cite a study of how many Americans have earned more than their parents, from 1940 to the present day. I’ll give you the good news first: we won World War II. The bad news is that since then, the percentage of adults who make more than their parents has declined—sharply. While 92% of children born in 1940 wound up earning more than their parents, only 46% of adults born in 1990 do. If you’ve been born since then, and your version of the American Dream involves buying anything, you have half the chance your grandparents did.

Maybe that’s because there’s been no economic growth since the 1970s—even when you adjust income for taxes and transfers, or tax-funded benefits—for half of American households. Spoiler alert: It’s the bottom half. But half! That’s astonishing. Even as it doubled in size, the economy managed to do nothing for half of us, for the last 40 years. That’s from your boy Thomas Piketty, that dude Emmanuel Saez, and some new jack named Gabriel Zucman who was probably in charge of writing everything down.

Anyway, there’s quantitative proof that we live in a less just society. Or maybe it’s just a more efficient one. How that looks probably depends on where you sit. If I had to estimate it, I’d say there’s about a 50 percent chance of you coming down on either side. What a time to be alive.

Times: US middle class no longer word’s richest

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare 3 Comments
The American middle class

In Canada, this man would have a nice beer.

The New York Times is running stories about inequality, and they are running hard. Today brings news that the American middle class is no longer the richest in the world. Our hardworking suburban football fans were tied with Canada’s hockey-gazing layabouts in 2010, and data suggest we’ve been surpassed since. Our poor—families at the 20th percentile of US income—make substantially less than families in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands. But those are all socialist countries. Our working poor may not have as much money, but they have freedom. In the decade since “freedom” became the most important word in American rhetoric, per capita income has shrunk at the 40th, 30th, 20th, 10th and 5th percentiles.

Continue reading

Piketty: Inequality returning to 19th-century model

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 1 Comment
Economist Thomas Piketty wears a dress shirt in the French style.

Economist Thomas Piketty wears a dress shirt in the French style.

If you like totalizing theories of economics the way I do—which is to say, if you like reading descriptions of those theories—you have probably heard about Thomas Piketty and Capital In the 21st Century. The English translation of the 700-page book has been well-received since its publication last month, and Piketty has been interviewed in just about every outlet imaginable, including the New York Times. That one is worth reading, if for no other reason than for his observation that the income distribution that characterized the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when “the top 10 percent of the distribution was full of rental income, dividend income, interest income,” is coming back.

Continue reading