I enjoyed reading this post, as I’m always perplexed by the extent of inequality in life. Having had the privilege of living as the working poor, and of extreme decadence, I’m in a position to state quite simply:

Nominal and material inequality are one and the same.

Only an academic could think otherwise. As one poster has suggested, the freedom to chose one shit job over another, cannot be compared with deciding which resort you want to spend your summer at.

They are not equal

statements like this undermine the entire comment base to this posting.

The middle class developed after World War II because of the housing and G.I. support from the government. However back then a moderate lifestyle could be supported by a single working parent. Nowadays except for the wealthy, most families need to have both adults working full time to support an acceptable lifestyle. Given that a worker working full time on minimum wage earns below the given poverty line is truly frightening. Not to mention that when I am fired from a job for poor performance, my severance package rarely approaches the 200 million height.

Education is the solution, however to create an educational system that is based on a market already skewed towards the elitist society would only further inequality. We trap the poor and then blame them when they do not succeed. So what are they to do? And besides, does anyone personally need a net worth of over a couple million dollars? Why do economists believe that economic laws are equivalent to physical laws, unchangeable and necessary. The market is not God, despite how much you wish it to be.

In particular I was struck by your distinction between nominal and material welfare, and your argument that the material conditions of the less well off are not so different from those at the top in qualitative terms. I think that is a point that is well worth pondering, and with a good deal of truth to it which I had not adequately considered in the past.

That said, I would like to make a couple of quibbles. First a minor one: it is true that total compensation, including fringe benefits, is a better guide than wages when looking at what workers earn. As an employer myself however I would like to point out that some of those fringe benefits do not in fact benefit the typical worker to the degree you might think. Take worker’s compensation: are you aware of the massive amount of fraud that goes on in that area? In my own company — a landscaping firm — there have been only a few piddling claims in twenty years if you don’t count the fraudulent ones. But they were massive, and had the effect of depriving honest workers of a big peice of their earnings (the tax rate in Tennessee for workers comp is close to 10%). Unfortunately there is no effective way to police this problem, at least so far.

Employee medical insurance is another problematic area: the huge escalation in the costs of medical care do not reflect real improvement in care and are largely beyong the power of employees to do anything about (or employers either, for that matter). There is enormous waste in the medical system which impacts workers with lower nominal wages disproportionately. You might acknowledge this reality which only qualifies but hardly refutes your main point.

Another area of consideration: material conditions are a matter not only of what we consume but also what we have to do in order to get the things we consume. Many low-skilled married couples find themselves forced to work full-time (both of them) outside the home, even when their children are only a few weeks old. This is a real issue of quality that does not impact many wealthier families. I think you should acknowledge that.

I believe you do acknowledge the problem of poor public schools: in low-income areas, and often throughout entire metropolitan areas (such as the one I live in, Chattanooga, TN)the conditions are abominable. In these communities private schools are the only quality alternative, and only affluent families can afford them.

Neighborhood safety is another fundamental problem that impacts low and high income families very differently. If you live in a leafy suburban neighborhood such as I live in you do not even have to lock your doors. Shoot, we don’t even have locks. Contrast that to people who have to worry and care about robbery, assault, etc.

Don’t get me wrong. I think you make a powerful argument. It might be even more powerful if you would candidly admit some of its shortcomings. This is not a perfect world even if it is infinitely better than any other world that has ever existed for most people.

In fact I

So it’s not so much of an obesity problem as it is a not-occasionally-starving problem.

But yes, if the least well off have all the basics and can pursue a full life then some of us who cared can go back to sleep.
Forgive me though, if i doubt they have much chance of a really satisfying life !
And I always thought the problem for the working poor, and for very many in better paid work, was the compulsion to work harder and longer and in less pleasant and rewarding occupations than they would chose if free.

To change this I am fairly sure, requires not some attack on wealth creation but an alteration in the fundamental relations of economic power, ( regarding land, labour and capital)

Fortunately I am getting old enough not to really hope for such idealistic outcomes!

regards David L.

Fair enough…I don’t really know what standard to use to judge whether our least well off are treated well enough. When I asked the question, I had the following quote of Will’s in mind, so I merely assumed that we had not reached that point:

“I care a great deal that people have enough in material terms to realize their basic capacities and to implement the projects that give their lives meaning. I certainly don’t think we’re there yet.”

So, while it is unclear how close we are to that ideal, the flow of the discussion here suggests that our least well-off should have at least enough resources to flourish in enough different status compeitions (besides income) that they can effectively find their niche. It’s a weird way to think about inequality maybe, but this is the point of Will’s posting I think — if you can’t have income, you’ll compete on other dimensions.

While I do think we do treat our least advantaged groups fairly well in some ways, it seems pretty clear to me that those occupying the lower rungs of the social ladder have a narrow range of choices on which to compete.

Thus, while it may be easy for someone like Will to switch from one seemingly great status competition (grad school) to another (blogger/policy analyst or whatever) poor people would have to switch from one extremely modest competition to another extremely modest one. To assume away the effects of income — I called them “side effects” earlier but they are very important because they directly relate to opportunities to switch status competitions — seems kind of strange.

DED

PS: obesity (or mere “fatness”) among the poor is not necessarily a good sign…Being fat from too many Big Macs seems prefereable to starving, to be sure, but it carries with it many health problems that are compounded by lack of health education and other medical resources. THis phenomenon could be considered as much of a failure in terms of health as it is a success in feeding everyone…

You will probably disagree, but I believe the U.S. is taking sufficient care of its “least privileged”. No one goes hungry in America. The abundance of non-profit hospitals and clinics ensures no one is lacking medical care. We’ve set up shelters all over the nation to care for the “homeless” - most of whom suffer addiction or mental illness. Both private and public funding provide billions in assistance for the disabled.

I’m not sure what your mean by sufficient care - what standard you have in mind. I do remember this 1984 campaign quote from Phil Gramm:

“Has anyone noticed that we live in the only country in the world where all the poor people are fat?”

Respectfully,
Whit

* Concerning the Gallery of Regrettable Food, I completely agree that the diet of suburbanites has improved dramatically since the middle of the 20th century. The processed food industry has gotten a lot better at preserving and transporting food from farm to factory to grocery store. (It still has a long way to go, though. Only a very few of the hundreds of types of salad greens travel very well, so you only get a few types in the grocery store.) This is why my original question concerned diets from a century ago, not 60 years ago.

* The NY Times article has very little to say about nutrition, other than that most modern Americans are bordering on obese, and some studies suggest that poor nutrition in the formative years can lead to health problems later on. The article largely lays the blame for the poor condition of Americans in the 19th century at the door of disease, which was obviously a huge problem, especially for American urbanites (who mostly lived in tight-packed squalor).

The article also doesn’t compare body size and longevity of 19th-century Americans with people of other countries or previous centuries. You might find this (http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/science/article.jsp?content=20050404_103140_103140) intersting, for example. The Cheyenne of the 19th century were apparently some of the tallest people in the world; they certainly aren’t that way now, so you can’t lay the blame on genetics. The article has a definite socialist slant, but you can ignore that and just look at the data on height, which indicates that the Civil War period, the main point of reference for the Times article, was a definite low point for European-American health.

Pick up a copy of this:

http://www.amazon.com/Gallery-Regrettable-Food-James-Lileks/dp/0609607820/sr=8-2/qid=1157839756/ref=pd_bbs_2/002-4004458-8296006?ie=UTF8&s=books

And see if you can make the case that we used to eat better, healthier foods. Not only did we eat worse, we were much less healthy. You might have run across this story, for example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/health/30age.html?ex=1157947200&en=ec3245284d494f7e&ei=5070

But

In the spirit of intellectual honesty, you recognize a possible objection to inequality (if only an indirect one):

“by putting a wall between education and market feedback mechanisms, we have created an apartheid system that ensures that millions of the poorest among us don’t fully develop some of their crucial basic capacities, trapping them and their children (who will go to the same terrible schools) at the bottom of the pile. The point is not that schools need to be more equal, but that schools for the least well-off need to be as good as my $16 Wal-Mart jeans.”

So (as you’ve repeatedly said) inequality per se is not the problem so long as the bottom tier has the basic elements to flourish. This idea seems pretty reasonable to me. But is it feasible to assume that we can have massive inequities in political power and still take care of our most disadvantaged groups to a satisfactory extent? It’s a logically consistent goal, to be sure, but why haven’t we accomplished it yet? Are there any historical examples of nations with huge economic inequalities that manage to take sufficient care of their least privileged?

I’m not sure if there’s an institutional answer or a more human (cognitive) explanation of this, but it seems to me that the burden of persuasion lies with people who don’t care about inequality to prove that it doesn’t necessarily lead to a lower class whose basic needs (educational, etc) are not met.

Comparative data regarding the relationship between inequality and the life standards of the lowest tier would help!

DED

To answer you fully would take way too much space on Will’s blog, but here are some things to think about:

Corn mush with cod oil doesn’t necessarily sound tasty (especially if it’s prepared with a garnish of seagull poop, which I agree is not very sanitary). But it’s packed with excellent nutrients, including cod oil, which is a perfect source of omega-3 fatty acids — something that most Americans get nowhere near enough of today.

As for eating out of the root cellar, it’s true that most of the human race went through lean times and times of plenty every year. It’s what we’re used to, evolutionarily speaking, and it’s what we’re designed for. I suspect having less to eat every once in a while would make the obesity problem in this country disappear rather quickly.

If that’s not how you (or most people) would LIKE to eat — if they’d rather have a convenient Twinkie and a soda than homemade applesauce and root beer (both of which are dirt cheap if you do it yourself, healthy, and available in the winter if they’re stored properly) — then maybe that is the real answer to my original question.