Re: [Futurework] NYT Series: Class in America: shadowy lines thatstilldivide

[Ed Weick]

Not really sure of what you are saying, Harry.  If you are telling me that the present situation has been encountered many times in the past, I'd agree.  Because of their control over land or capital, the rich have always been enormously better off than the poor.  Except perhaps during periods of great economic and social change, income and class gaps have tended to widen instead of narrow.   However, I would argue that, in the past, the poor had more ways of getting out of situations of poverty than they have today.  The 18th and 19th Centuries were times of large-scale population movements, not only from the country to the city, but from country to country.  Early in the 19th Century, one branch of my ancestry was trapped in a part of Germany, Baden-Wuertemburg, that had been ravaged by war and was going absolutely nowhere economically.  So they got out of there by moving to another part of Germany, then to the Ukraine and then to Canada.  It took a hundred years or so, but while each of the early moves paid-off in small ways, the final move, to Canada, paid off rather handsomely.  The Irish left famine ravaged Ireland during and after the 1850s in droves and headed to the US and Canada.  That also paid off, as did a mass exodus from the Ukraine early in this century.  One also thinks of the migration across the US and Canada during the 19th and 20th Centuries.  It paid off hugely for Americans and Canadians of European extraction, even if it played hell with native Americans.   My point is that moving to a place in which you could find work and a livelihood was a real possibility during recent times, but times that are now past.  Now the world is filled up.  Relocating to a better place is far less possible.  Sure, techies still move to California, as many from the Ottawa area did not long ago, but now it is mainly the jobs that are moving.  In the US, the movement of jobs from the  northeast in the 1960s produced the Rust Belt, noted for its abandonment of factories as manufacturers relocated to less costly places in the south, overseas, and Mexico.  The loss of jobs is currently continuing with the outsourcing of hi-tech, manufacturing and service jobs to developing countries in Asia.  You can't move Americans to where the jobs are going, but you can move jobs and capital to places where labour is cheaper.    It is not only the fact that the world has now filled up that has produced this situation.  It is also that there are huge wage disparities in wage costs between rich lands and poor .  Increasingly, the poor world produces and the rich world consumes.  This probably won't work as a long run strategy.  The productive world will get richer, as China and India are, and the rich world will get poorer.  But what is happening isn't based on long run thinking or strategizing.  It's based on millions of little decisions people take every day.  Manufacturers or people in the service industries think about where they can get things done cheapest and consumers think about where they can buy the cheapest products - why, Wal-Mart of course, which gets a lot of the stuff it sells from China.  And while it's all happening, this filled-up world is becoming more rigid in terms of its class structure and what we can all expect out of life.    Ed   ----- Original Message ----- From: Harry Pollard To: 'Ed Weick' ; 'Karen Watters Cole' ; futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2005 10:33 PM Subject: RE: [Futurework] NYT Series: Class in America: shadowy lines thatstilldivide Ed,   Again, I must remind you that Classical Political Economy forecast all this 200 years ago, yet it�s still a subject that invites guesswork from the neo-Classicals. Such as:   �Globalization and technological change have shuttered factories, killing jobs that were once stepping-stones to the middle class. Now that manual labor can be done in developing countries for $2 a day, skills and education have become more essential than ever.�   Would they like to calculate the income gap in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries? The very rich enjoyed god-like stature while the poor were crammed into tiny leaky, smoky, dwellings that would not be allowed for animals by today�s Humane Society. Even in the period of immense �technological progress� of the Industrial Revolution life was hellish. You�ll recall my piece about the Welsh coal mines and the 6 year old boys in pitch blackness opening the doors for the coal trucks to come through.   The big war interrupted the normal course of events and ended with such �technological advances� as the GI Bill and Levittown. But, soon the inevitable pressure downward began again.   So, it seems that rather adopt an old-fashioned but supported analysis, the modern economist tries to link the long-time problem to recent happenings. I suppose it makes him feel more hip. To do this, they furiously contrive relationships in a way not remarkably different from the Bush/Blair machinations around Iraqi intelligence.   Your points are well taken Ed, but you are a scientist confronting a kind of non-science where rigor is closer to mortis than to method.   Harry   ******************************* Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655  Tujunga  CA 91042 818 352-4141 *******************************     From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 1:01 PM To: Karen Watters Cole; futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca Subject: Re: [Futurework] NYT Series: Class in America: shadowy lines thatstilldivide   It was Keith who posed the original link to the NYTimes, Karen, not me.  What I found about article is that it contains an almost dizzying amount of verbiage about class and mobility among classes without giving us a clear idea of what class is.  It suggests it can be a variety of things, in some places Presbyterian, in others Baptist.  It also suggests that movement between classes is possible to the extent of being almost commonplace - get the right education and then the right job and you can move up.  All of this is well and good, and probably true to an extent, but what it detracts from is that the concept of class must most basically hinge on income.  This is dealt with, but not really very well.  To be in a higher class than another person must mean you have more income than that person.  What the article does not really convey well enough is a sense of is the distribution of income and hence the level of inequality encountered in the US.  The following chart shows the distribution of household income for the US in 2002.         The chart shows that in 2002 the top, or most affluent, fifth of US households had 49.7 percent of total income, while the bottom fifth had only 3.5 percent. Thus, the top fifth of all households had 14.3 times more income than the bottom fifth, and the top fifth had approximately as much income as all other households combined.  People in a lower quintile can have as many cellphones or be as Episcopalian or Republican or whatever as people in a higher quintile, but the most significant marker of what they can or can't do and who they can or can't associate with is how much money the have in comparison with the people in the quintiles above or below them. (I'm merely using the chart to illustrate a point.  It's from "Two Americas: One Rich, One Poor? Understanding Income Inequality in the United States", by Robert Rector and Rea Hederman, Jr. found at http://www.heritage.org/Research/Taxes/bg1791.cfm) The article mentions that a study conducted by Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that fewer families moved from one quintile of the income ladder (upward surely) to another during the 1980's than during the 1970's and that still fewer moved in the 90's than in the 80's. A study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics also found that mobility declined from the 80's to the 90's.  This may be significant because it indicates that the class structure is solidifying after having opened up in the decades following WWII.   The article also mentions cultural myth making that has reinforced perceptions of mobility - e.g. TV programs like American Idol and The Apprentice.   "But beneath all that murkiness and flux, some of the same forces have deepened the hidden divisions of class. Globalization and technological change have shuttered factories, killing jobs that were once stepping-stones to the middle class. Now that manual labor can be done in developing countries for $2 a day, skills and education have become more essential than ever. This has helped produce the extraordinary jump in income inequality. The after-tax income of the top 1 percent of American households jumped 139 percent, to more than $700,000, from 1979 to 2001, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which adjusted its numbers to account for inflation. The income of the middle fifth rose by just 17 percent, to $43,700, and the income of the poorest fifth rose only 9 percent." While "Faith in mobility, after all, has been consciously woven into the national self-image", it looks as though upward inter-class mobility is going to become less and less of a reality in coming years, while downward mobility is becoming an increasing probability. Ed

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