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This may well be true of a lot of people in my generation who are moving up in the world, but still lack healthcare or face worse job prospects than our parents' generation did.
Most people are in a much better situation than their parents were, and their prospects are dramatically better. Few would choose to trade places (losing years now, or going back in time and losing technology).
It's easy to find comparisons to anger one, if he's inclined to look for those things and to get angry about them. But, I don't think that there's any public policy that's going to solve such people's problems.
It's true that some of them don't know it. But it's also true that many people (and more will come to) realize that trade makes us better off, generally; and protectionism is for losers.
You know, there's really more to life than iPods ... such as houses in good school districts with reasonable commutes so you can afford to have children before you're 40. On the crucial metric of "affordable family formation" are we really better off?
Are we biased against realizing it?
Yes.
At my age, my parents had a family car and a truck for hauling supplies. The car was ten years old, making it the "new" car. The truck was older.
They had one TV, black and white with VHF only. You watched what the Big 3 gave you, or you read a book. (We had lots of books, many 40 years old or more.) Or you could listen to the radio. (Radios were cheap, so everybody had one.)
They had two phones, but only because Dad salvaged one thrown away at the factory. Those two phones shared one land line. It hadn't been a party line in nearly a decade, so we thought it was pretty cool. On the other hand, long distance cost so much that it was reserved for a five minute call at holidays.
Maybe once a month, if we were very good, we might go out to eat -- meaning we stopped at McDonald's and ate in the car. Otherwise, meals were at home, hand made by Mom (or by Dad, depending on the night). A lot of the food was grown in our own garden. The beef was usually from a side of beef we purchased from a friend with a dairy farm, and stuck in a giant freezer all year. Mom canned lots of vegetables, pickles, and jams and jellies.
To make ends meet, Dad worked a lot of overtime, plus some moonlighting jobs that kept him out late nights.
So when I read this...
"You know, there’s really more to life than iPods … such as houses in good school districts with reasonable commutes so you can afford to have children before you’re 40. On the crucial metric of “affordable family formation” are we really better off?"
...I have to wonder if the families who can't afford houses in good school districts with reasonable commutes might have more income for those purposes if they simply lived what was a common middle class lifestyle of the 70s.
I'm not saying anyone HAS TO live that way; but since we were healthy and happy and not particularly deprived, then that's a decent standard of living. Anyone whose lifestyle is a lot higher than that -- more and newer cars, more electronic toys, more DVDs and just more stuff -- is choosing a set of nonessential luxuries. That may prevent them from choosing another set of nonessential luxuries, such as "houses in good school districts with reasonable commutes so you can afford to have children before you’re 40." But that's a choice, not a hardship forced on them by the economy.
Gil is absolutely right.
I think you're thinking of a pickelhaube (spiked helmet.)
But seriously...
Will, you're on target here about the improbability of a populist strategy, and Martin has it exactly right. He is describing the reality if what is now recalled as the Golden Age of working-class life. And yeah, you had health insurance -- but when you got to the doctor they couldn't cure much beyond bacterial infections and basic surgery. Heart problems involving surgery, cancer of any kind, organ failures -- they pretty much just sent you home to recover or die, mostly the latter
There are real strains on family income- a recent report showed that many families local and state taxes have increased dramatically over the last 20 years- but in some cases I think that our parents generation was better off simply because they lived more modestly, so they had less to worry about.
I think if people today who are struggling with debt would adopt the type of lifestyle that was considered normal about 40 years ago, they would soon find themselves with large savings accounts.
The other problem I have here is that people neither marry nor vote by reason alone, or perhaps even primarily. Broadly speaking, you are right that a laid-off GE supervisor now working in a Wal-Mart without insurance would be more likely to survive cancer or a heart attack today than the CEO of GE would have been 30 years ago. However, I see two very large confounding factors here.
First, products with warranties are worth more than equivalent ones without, even if consumers expect to not need the warranty during the life of the product. Recently I had an uninsured, low-income friend who needed major surgery, and while in the end she received very good care without being financially devastated, the minute she was able to afford insurance, she shelled out for it, and felt much better as a result.
Second, the argument about everyone being better off than everyone was 20 or 30 years ago has the problem of requiring people to differentiate between relative and absolute outcomes. In my day job I do a lot of sales and marketing, and I've learned the hard way that consumers can't be trusted to understand anything that requires even one level of extrapolation. I can hear John Edwards saying, "This nut wants you to believe you're better off without insurance today than you were with insurance 10 or 20 years ago."