WHAT TO DO ON A SNOWY DAY

As you may have read, the southland was hit by a snowstorm yesterday, and at 2 p.m. or so, while Susie and I were working on the jigsaw puzzle in the lobby, the power went out [a falling tree limb hit a power line.]  Each of the buildings in my retirement home is supposed to have an emergency generator, but the switch-over mechanism in the generator for Building 5 was faulty, so we were pretty soon without any power at all, even for the elevator.  I went door to door in my building, checking on everyone to make sure they were o.k. [as I have mentioned, the office of Precinct Representative for Building 5 is the only thing I have ever been elected to, and I take my duties seriously.]  Then Susie and I ate in the main dining room while the generator was being fixed and afterward, guided only by the flashlight built into my IPhone, we fed the cat and went to bed, even though it was only 6 p.m.  The apartment was quickly getting colder [no heat] and there did not seem to be anything else to do.  At 7:05, just as we were drifting off to sleep, the power came back, lights went on, and I got up to reset all the clocks.

The power is still on, but we got a good deal of snow and freezing rain which continues as I write, so today I am snowbound.  Early this morning, as I surfed the web, checking the NY TIMES and the Washington Post, I came across an Op Ed by the economist Robert Samuelson, with an arresting tagline:  “We’ve become addicted to the income stagnation story. It’s probably not true.”  Seeing as how I am one of those addicted, I thought I had better read the column.  In it, I found a link to a new article by Thomas Piketty and others ostensibly providing evidence for Samuelson’s claim. Well, readers of this blog are aware that I was very impressed with Thomas Piketty’s book, CAPITAL in the Twenty-First Century, even going so far four and a half years ago as to write a four-part 9,000 word review, so I followed the link, and have spent the past two hours reading a fascinating and very lengthy essay published in the QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS for May, 2018, entitled DISTRIBUTIONAL NATIONAL ACCOUNTS: METHODS AND ESTIMATES FOR THE UNITED STATES, by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman.  I don’t know what Samuelson has been smoking, as we used to say back in the day, but the essay by Piketty, Saez, and Zucman presents a detailed and, I think, politically very important story of American income stagnation in the past thirty-five years.  My aim in this brief blog post is to tell you a bit of what I learned from the essay.  If this is a subject that interests you, I strongly urge you to read the entire thing.  You can find it here.

The focus of Piketty’s 2014 book was the growth, or rather the re-emergence, world-wide of extreme inequality of income and wealth, with most of the attention on the top 1%, or 0.1%, or 0.01%, or even 0.001%.  The new essay deals with trends in income across the board in America, not just among the rich.  The authors divide the American population into three groups:  the Bottom 50%, the “Middle Class,” identified as the 50^th to the 90^th percentiles, and the rich – the top 10%. 

Now, it is, if you think about it, extremely peculiar to call those in the 50^th-90^th percentiles “the middle class.”  Surely it would make more sense to call those, say, in the 30^th-70^th percentiles “Middle.”  But the authors have a method in their methodological madness, and it is, I think, deeply and deliberately political.

If I may summarize 50 pages of statistics, diagrams, and methodological cautions in a phrase, Piketty et al. show that in the last thirty-five years in America, the bottom half has stagnated, the 40% above them have done well enough to make them feel that the system is working for them, and the rich have made out like gangbusters.

The authors are able to break the statistics down so that they can track income pre- and post-tax, income by age, and even income by gender.  The post-tax income includes government transfers and redistributions, principally, but not solely, in the form of Social Security payments and Medicare and Medicaid.  They are able to show that whatever post-tax improvement there is over the years in the income of the Bottom 50% can be traced almost entirely to Social Security and Medicare.

What does all of this mean for politics?  [You realize that I am rushing past vast quantities of fascinating and important detail.  You really must read the essay yourselves.]  Well, think of it in human terms, as I think Piketty and company intend us to do.  For more than thirty years, fully half of American adults have seen no material improvement in their life chances and experiences.  They are better off when they get old – indeed, in real terms, they are sometimes better off old than when they were young – and that means, among other things, that when they are in middle life, they are not burdened with caring for their indigent parents.  But they have no reason to think that their children will be better off than they are.  What is more, they can see all around them that the “Middle Class” is in fact doing better and better, which is manifestly and infuriatingly unfair.

Piketty has some statistics about the higher educational credentials of those in one or another of the three groups, and not at all surprisingly, those in that 50^th to 90^th group are far more likely to possess those credentials than those in the Bottom 50%.

There really are Three Americas.  The authors do not present any statistics on intergenerational mobility, but it is almost certainly the case that upward mobility depends heavily on education, which in turn depends on the income level of the parents. 

The adult American population probably numbers around 200 million [the authors count those 20 and older as adult, rather than those 18 and older], so we are talking about one hundred million men and women whose life chances have been essentially flat since Reagan was elected.

The political implications of this simple fact are enormous.