The Gilded Age Comes to the Masses

December 9, 2010

The Gilded Age Comes to the Masses

George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan recently opined about how well we live compared to even the richest Americans at the end of the 19th century:

I just returned from the Biltmore, America’s largest home. Built by George Vanderbilt between 1889 and 1895, the Biltmore is a symbol of how good the rich had it during the Gilded Age. I’m sure that most of the other visitors would answer “very good indeed.”

But how many would actually want to trade places with George? Despite his massive library, organ, and so on, I submit that any modern with a laptop and an internet connection has a vastly better book and music collection than he did. For all his riches, he didn’t have air conditioning; he had to suffer through the North Carolina summers just like the poorest of us. Vanderbilt did travel the world, but without the airplane, he had to do so at a snail’s pace.

Perhaps most shockingly, he suffered “sudden death from complications following an appendectomy” at the age of 51. (Here’s the original NYT obituary). Whatever your precise story about the cause of rising lifespans, it’s safe to say that George’s Bane wouldn’t be fatal today.

I visited the Biltmore when I was in elementary school and remember being struck by the novelty and opulence of Vanderbilt’s private two-lane bowling alley. Vanderbilt no doubt spent a small fortune to build his alley and employ the servants necessary to run and maintain it, but I use far better equipment to bowl in my weekly league than Vanderbilt could ever imagine. The ball return at my alley is likely faster and more reliable, and the pins are reset far more quickly and exactly by a machine than a low-wage pin setter. Finally, whereas Vanderbilt had to keep score on his own — or pay a servant to do it — I have a friendly robot to count up my pinfall for me and give me advice on my next shot.

In many — if not most — ways, the average American lives a far better life than even the richest mustache-twisting robber barons of the Gilded Age, and it’s all thanks to steady economic growth. If two economies started at the same level and one grew by an extra 2 percent each year, it would be twice the size of its rival in a little more than 35 years. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Lucas once remarked, when contemplating the differences in international economic growth rates, “The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.” A similar idea is expressed more succinctly by a quote usually (but falsely, in all likelihood) attributed to Albert Einstein: “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.”

Rising living standards allow us to live longer, healthier, and, yes, even happier lives. (No, you cannot buy happiness with money, but as best we can measure these things, people on the average seem to get happier as they get wealthier.) Consequently, that means we should make high growth levels a priority in economic policy, and that requires us to keep taxes and government spending low.

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Pingback by The Gilded Age Comes to the Masses « Rough Ol' Boy — December 9, 2010 @ 11:12 p.m.
While Caplan’s thought experiment is an interesting one, I believe that ultimately it should be rejected. I am disturbed by both of your uses of the ambiguous word ‘better.’ A modern reader with a computer has a ‘better’ collection of books and music than Vanderbilt? If so, we must be using different definitions of the word ‘book.’ There is a tactile, qualitative difference between words on a screen, and a finely bound and printed book. I reject the notion that quantity supersedes quality when referring to books.

And while it is true that air conditioning has lead to greater levels of comfort, are not the unborn even more comfortable than any of the living, having never suffered pain? Are they better off?

You claim that Americans today lead ‘better’ lives than the so-called Robber Barons. But those men had what very few of the rich today have: the finest service available (and how many Americans enjoy food as fine as Vanderbilt enjoyed), collections of truly priceless treasures (meaning not that the market can’t value them, but that any price would be irrelevant to a real collector with the means to own them), the freedom to set one’s own agenda and associate with only persons of one’s choosing, and the greatest luxury of all, time and leisure.

How many of the rich today live in vacuous architecture, with cardboard on the inner walls, plastic on the outer walls, and manufactured imitation wood underfoot? Vanderbilt knew better, and lived amongst stone, wood, and iron. I have yet to see a manufactured home that is ‘better’ than a home built by talented craftspersons. Vanderbilt employed them by the thousands.

Also, Vanderbilt enjoyed the best of everything that was available in his own age, something that very few of us will ever achieve.

Comment by Steven S. Hoffmann — December 9, 2010 @ 11:15 p.m.
Have you ever been to the Biltmore? Like most old buildings, it’s really drafty and uncomfortable, and I’m not buying this old saw that old buildings are more solidly constructed than new ones. I’ve lived and worked in a lot of old buildings–a few from the era Biltmore was constructed–and every single one of them is an absolute nightmare for climate control. They are frigid in the winter and broiling in the summer. I am quite looking forward to going to my parents’ house, which was built in the mid 1990s, for Christmas for a few days because unlike my old apartment, I can actually be warm inside it without three layers of clothing.

I’d also argue that our food is much better than what Vanderbilt had. He could basically never have fresh fruit when it was out of season, and I’m willing to bet that he never had a spicy tuna roll or chicken vindaloo. Even the richest Americans’ dining choices were heavily restricted by what they could grow on their own property or buy at the local market, which wasn’t a whole lot.

I also prefer printed books to electronic ones, but there is no doubt that I have access to vastly more information with my internet connection than Vanderbilt ever did. And, when I want a real book, I can go to the library to borrow one or buy it from any number of bookstores for a relatively low price compared to what Vanderbilt paid.

I’ll concede that Vanderbilt had more time and leisure than most of us today, but the amount of time the average American has away from work has increased dramatically since the late nineteenth century.

Finally, I’m unmoved by the point about having the best in a given age. Maybe this is just a value judgment, but I have never cared much for goods sought as status symbols. I suppose some people do derive great pleasure from simply knowing that they have better stuff than their peers, but there is literally nothing that can be done to change that. In every status hierarchy, someone or some group must be at the top. We will not succeed in destroying those hierarchies, but what we have done is multiply them in thousands of ways. Every niche interest has some kind of hierarchy, which allows almost everyone to be among the best at *something*. The more specialization, the more each person’s unique talents can bestow high status upon them.

Comment by John Payne — December 10, 2010 @ 9:55 a.m.
Yes, thanks to unioins, the New Deal and a progressive Democratic party, the average family in the United States does have many advantages even the Vanderbilts did not have. But caution: the conservatives and the right wing Republicans have, since the 1980s, been hell-bent on taking away these benefits gained by average Americans, and have made a good start toward that goal in recent years.

Comment by dempster holland — December 10, 2010 @ 1:30 p.m.
Care to offer any evidence for those assertions? I would take a much different view: wages rose along with productivity. As capital improvements–both physical and human–allowed workers to produce more goods and services with less and time and effort, their pay increased accordingly as businesses bid up the price of their services.

Unions no doubt have sometimes increased the wages of their members, but they are unable to increase total wages in an industry because labor cannot increase its share at the expense of capital. When unions drive up wages that prices lower-skilled workers out of the market. This is why African-Americans regularly referred to FDR’s National Recovery Act as the “Negro Removal Act,” “Negroes Ruined Again,” and “Negroes Robbed Again.” (See more here: http://mason.gmu.edu/~dbernste/publicinterest.html).

If your story were correct, any industry whose workers are not unionized should exist in grinding poverty, but that’s not the case. Unions are less than 1/8 (12.4%) of the labor force and only 7.6% in the private sector, but 87.6% of the labor force is not utterly destitute. How do you explain that? Furthermore, the average worker would be far better off if he did not have to pay the outrageous salaries and pensions of unionized public sector workers in taxes. So, yes, some unions have made themselves quite wealthy…on the backs of all other workers.

Comment by John Payne — December 10, 2010 @ 2:04 p.m.
Unions have histrically shifted money from business owners to the workers who make their business work, The principle is simple: if one worker demands a raise by himself, he can easily be replaced. But if all workers get together and demand a raise, the employer must think twice about firing them all. If the demand is reasonable, he will give in. You love the market, I assume. Unions are nothing more than workers banding together to exercise their market power..
Hisstorically, this has not driven lower wage workers out of the market. Rather, it tends to raise their wages,since employers must pay more because of the competition from higher paid union jobs And the minimum wage law assists in that endeavor. These two things–minimum wage laws and unions–combined to increase the incomes of the majority of American families throughout the 20th centry. In the process this raised the standard of lviing. It also allowed the country to avoid the turmoil which many other countries had which turned to socialsim. Our mixed system has worked quite well. It is only recently that conservatives like yourself, not satisfied with the rich being so rich, have attemtped to turn back the clock and lower everyone’s income except the rich. The problem is that you are apparently unaware of the history of the industrial revolution and of the demcratic response to it. I guess they don’t teach that in business school.

Comment by dempster holland — December 11, 2010 @ 2:27 p.m.
I would note further that you have apparently adoopted the newest party line of the conservatives–the supposodly high salaries of public workers. Two comments on that. First of all, you don’t see 30-year olds getting million-dollar bonuses like you do on Wall St. Second of all, the average federal employee salary will be higher than the private sector because there are very few, if any, minimum wage employees at the federal level.

Comment by dempster holland — December 11, 2010 @ 2:32 p.m.
Your comments deserve a response because they reflect the mythos many Americans have built up around unions, but I think this demands a fairly lengthy blog post, so be looking for that in the near future. I will link it here once it is posted.

Also, for the record, I did not go to business school; I was a history major, and I earned almost 70 of my 120 credits in the subject. I barely set foot inside the business school the entire time I was in college. Furthermore, I am not a conservative but a libertarian. In fact, I had an hour long debate with my colleague David Stokes, where I argued that libertarians should not consider themselves allies of conservatives, which you can view here:

http://showmeinstitute.org/publication/id.316/pub_detail.asp

Perhaps you should do some research before you start throwing labels around.

Comment by John Payne — December 11, 2010 @ 3:54 p.m.
Sorry–I just assumed that since youy did not seem to acknowlege fundamental facts about American history, that you must have been a business major. I will look forward to your response on the union issue

Comment by dempster holland — December 11, 2010 @ 4:30 p.m.
First of all, nice Mr. Show reference!

Poverty and affluence are relative. Adam Smith writes about the linen shirt- a person without a linen shirt in the days before linen wasn’t deprived. But as wearing one became the norm, you were impoverished if you couldn’t afford one. Vanderbilt wasn’t rich because he owned the Biltmore, he was considered rich because he had so many things other people didn’t have. That people today have more things than Vanderbilt had in his time is completely irrelevant to any practical concern. The truth is that people today are more relatively deprived than ever when you look at the things that matter: health care, housing, public safety, etc. Who cares if more people have color TVs or some minimum level of comfort when they do not have access to the things that truly allow them to improve their lot? To justify poverty by saying things are better now than they were over 100 years ago is lazy and cold. We have a lot of damn work to do in this country. Government backing off of some things might be part of the answer, but pretending like the problem isn’t there doesn’t help anyone.

Comment by Rob — December 12, 2010 @ 11:46 a.m.
I certainly don’t want to give the impression that I don’t want people to have higher standards of living. I’d like it everyone could live better than they currently do, and I believe that the economic policies I promote would lead to greater material welfare for most people. (You may disagree those ends would flow the means, but that is my sincere belief.) That said, I reject a relative definition of poverty. If poverty is simply defined as the bottom quintile in income or a certain percentage of the median income, then I don’t think we can talk in any meaningful sense about eliminating poverty. Some people will always be poorer than others and some richer–even communism could not eliminate that fact.

That people have more things today than they did in the past is of immense practical concern. The people that have those things, by and large, enjoy them a great deal. It’s easy to dismiss more choices on television, chatting on Facebook, and the like as mere frivolities, but they often add so much to our lives. I have numerous friends that live across the country, and I interact with dozens of them on a regular basis because of Facebook and cell phones. That’s incredible and makes our lives better in a very deep and meaningful way.

I agree that we can make improvements in health care, housing, and public safety, but to say that people are worse off in those measures today than ever before–even in a relative since–is flat out wrong. Although life expectancy dropped slightly this year, the trend has been upwards for a long, long time for all groups. And, yes, those with higher incomes tend to live longer, but the differential between different ethnic groups is narrowing. Crime rates, especially violent crime rates, have dropped pretty steadily and across almost groups since the mid-1990s, and while I believe there are a number of racial biases built into our “criminal justice” system, it’s a far cry from the blatant oppression of minorities that was sanctioned by law less than half a century ago. Before the 1960s, it’s arguable that the police in Mississippi and several other states existed for the sole purpose of holding African-Americans down, and that has improved drastically. The average square footage of homes has risen spectacularly over the past forty years, even for the poor. Rates of divorce, teen pregnancy, and abortion rates have all declined substantially from their peaks. (You can find sources for these claims and more here: http://reason.com/archives/2009/01/01/the-good-news-from-a-bad-year)

Do we still have problems? Yes–massive ones–and we must address them. Please do not believe that I am advising complacence. We can do better, and I believe we will. However, I think it’s important to keep a little perspective and remember that we live better than the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived.

Comment by John Payne — December 12, 2010 @ 2:29 p.m.
Also, Rob, I’d like to post your comment and my reply to my personal blog. Would that be okay with you, and, if so, would you prefer for me to refer to you as Rob or simply as “a commenter”? And thank you so very much for noticing the Mr. Show reference. I will try to work more of them into my posts in the future for you.

Dempster, my question about how you’d like me to refer to you in my forthcoming blog post on unions and rising wages goes for you as well.

Comment by John Payne — December 12, 2010 @ 2:34 p.m.
Post away, but please include this point of clarification on your statistics: the bottom quintile can move. A group with a median income of $50,000 and a bottom quintile with incomes of $1,000 to $5,000 is very different than a group with the same median but whose bottom quintile has incomes of $40,000 to $45,000. We can and should strive for a more even distribution where incomes cluster around the median. This is why many relative definitions of poverty use a proportion of the median: you can have zero earners in a distribution who make less than 50% of the median value.

All poverty is relative- the federal poverty line is relative to the cost of a minimum sustenance diet. The poverty measure you used in your post is relative to the standard of living of 100 years ago. You cannot reject this fact.

Since all poverty is relative and therefore really about equality, you should really read Amartya Sen’s “Inequality Reexamined.” It creates a good understanding of the foundation on which arguments about poverty and equality need to happen. Then it talks about exactly why equality is important (rather than equity) in some ways that you might not expect. Based on the few things of yours I’ve read, I think you would really enjoy and understand it.

Comment by Rob — December 13, 2010 @ 6:41 a.m.
I consent to your posting my comment and your response on your blog. As to your long response on the progress that has been made for average Americans, much of what you say is correct. But doesn’t that show the success of an activist federal government, New Deal policies and liberalism over the past seventy years?

Comment by dempster holland — December 13, 2010 @ 11:19 a.m.
[...] My last post comparing the standard of living of George Vanderbilt with that enjoyed by most Americans today has inspired a fair amount of debate, which has recently centered on the question of what has caused the incredible increase in real wages over the past hundred plus years: free markets or unions and government intervention. Instead of simply writing another comment in the thread, I decided to address this in another full blog post because this question gets to some of the most fundamental differences between those, like myself, who want minimal government control over markets and those who believe that governments need instead to steer markets and engineer desired outcomes. [...]

Pingback by Why Do Wages Increase? « Rough Ol' Boy — December 14, 2010 @ 11:35 a.m.
Here is my post on rising wages:

http://www.showmedaily.org/2010/12/why-do-wages-increase.html

I also plan on responding to some of the more recent points in the near future, but I have some other obligations to attend to for the moment.

Comment by John Payne — December 14, 2010 @ 11:37 a.m.

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Pingback by The Gilded Age Comes to the Masses « Rough Ol' Boy — December 9, 2010 @ 11:12 p.m.

While Caplan’s thought experiment is an interesting one, I believe that ultimately it should be rejected. I am disturbed by both of your uses of the ambiguous word ‘better.’ A modern reader with a computer has a ‘better’ collection of books and music than Vanderbilt? If so, we must be using different definitions of the word ‘book.’ There is a tactile, qualitative difference between words on a screen, and a finely bound and printed book. I reject the notion that quantity supersedes quality when referring to books.

And while it is true that air conditioning has lead to greater levels of comfort, are not the unborn even more comfortable than any of the living, having never suffered pain? Are they better off?

You claim that Americans today lead ‘better’ lives than the so-called Robber Barons. But those men had what very few of the rich today have: the finest service available (and how many Americans enjoy food as fine as Vanderbilt enjoyed), collections of truly priceless treasures (meaning not that the market can’t value them, but that any price would be irrelevant to a real collector with the means to own them), the freedom to set one’s own agenda and associate with only persons of one’s choosing, and the greatest luxury of all, time and leisure.

How many of the rich today live in vacuous architecture, with cardboard on the inner walls, plastic on the outer walls, and manufactured imitation wood underfoot? Vanderbilt knew better, and lived amongst stone, wood, and iron. I have yet to see a manufactured home that is ‘better’ than a home built by talented craftspersons. Vanderbilt employed them by the thousands.

Also, Vanderbilt enjoyed the best of everything that was available in his own age, something that very few of us will ever achieve.

Comment by Steven S. Hoffmann — December 9, 2010 @ 11:15 p.m.

Have you ever been to the Biltmore? Like most old buildings, it’s really drafty and uncomfortable, and I’m not buying this old saw that old buildings are more solidly constructed than new ones. I’ve lived and worked in a lot of old buildings–a few from the era Biltmore was constructed–and every single one of them is an absolute nightmare for climate control. They are frigid in the winter and broiling in the summer. I am quite looking forward to going to my parents’ house, which was built in the mid 1990s, for Christmas for a few days because unlike my old apartment, I can actually be warm inside it without three layers of clothing.

I’d also argue that our food is much better than what Vanderbilt had. He could basically never have fresh fruit when it was out of season, and I’m willing to bet that he never had a spicy tuna roll or chicken vindaloo. Even the richest Americans’ dining choices were heavily restricted by what they could grow on their own property or buy at the local market, which wasn’t a whole lot.

I also prefer printed books to electronic ones, but there is no doubt that I have access to vastly more information with my internet connection than Vanderbilt ever did. And, when I want a real book, I can go to the library to borrow one or buy it from any number of bookstores for a relatively low price compared to what Vanderbilt paid.

I’ll concede that Vanderbilt had more time and leisure than most of us today, but the amount of time the average American has away from work has increased dramatically since the late nineteenth century.

Finally, I’m unmoved by the point about having the best in a given age. Maybe this is just a value judgment, but I have never cared much for goods sought as status symbols. I suppose some people do derive great pleasure from simply knowing that they have better stuff than their peers, but there is literally nothing that can be done to change that. In every status hierarchy, someone or some group must be at the top. We will not succeed in destroying those hierarchies, but what we have done is multiply them in thousands of ways. Every niche interest has some kind of hierarchy, which allows almost everyone to be among the best at *something*. The more specialization, the more each person’s unique talents can bestow high status upon them.

Comment by John Payne — December 10, 2010 @ 9:55 a.m.

Yes, thanks to unioins, the New Deal and a progressive Democratic party, the average family in the United States does have many advantages even the Vanderbilts did not have. But caution: the conservatives and the right wing Republicans have, since the 1980s, been hell-bent on taking away these benefits gained by average Americans, and have made a good start toward that goal in recent years.

Comment by dempster holland — December 10, 2010 @ 1:30 p.m.

Care to offer any evidence for those assertions? I would take a much different view: wages rose along with productivity. As capital improvements–both physical and human–allowed workers to produce more goods and services with less and time and effort, their pay increased accordingly as businesses bid up the price of their services.

Unions no doubt have sometimes increased the wages of their members, but they are unable to increase total wages in an industry because labor cannot increase its share at the expense of capital. When unions drive up wages that prices lower-skilled workers out of the market. This is why African-Americans regularly referred to FDR’s National Recovery Act as the “Negro Removal Act,” “Negroes Ruined Again,” and “Negroes Robbed Again.” (See more here: http://mason.gmu.edu/~dbernste/publicinterest.html).

If your story were correct, any industry whose workers are not unionized should exist in grinding poverty, but that’s not the case. Unions are less than 1/8 (12.4%) of the labor force and only 7.6% in the private sector, but 87.6% of the labor force is not utterly destitute. How do you explain that? Furthermore, the average worker would be far better off if he did not have to pay the outrageous salaries and pensions of unionized public sector workers in taxes. So, yes, some unions have made themselves quite wealthy…on the backs of all other workers.

Comment by John Payne — December 10, 2010 @ 2:04 p.m.

Unions have histrically shifted money from business owners to the workers who make their business work, The principle is simple: if one worker demands a raise by himself, he can easily be replaced. But if all workers get together and demand a raise, the employer must think twice about firing them all. If the demand is reasonable, he will give in. You love the market, I assume. Unions are nothing more than workers banding together to exercise their market power..
Hisstorically, this has not driven lower wage workers out of the market. Rather, it tends to raise their wages,since employers must pay more because of the competition from higher paid union jobs And the minimum wage law assists in that endeavor. These two things–minimum wage laws and unions–combined to increase the incomes of the majority of American families throughout the 20th centry. In the process this raised the standard of lviing. It also allowed the country to avoid the turmoil which many other countries had which turned to socialsim. Our mixed system has worked quite well. It is only recently that conservatives like yourself, not satisfied with the rich being so rich, have attemtped to turn back the clock and lower everyone’s income except the rich. The problem is that you are apparently unaware of the history of the industrial revolution and of the demcratic response to it. I guess they don’t teach that in business school.

Comment by dempster holland — December 11, 2010 @ 2:27 p.m.

I would note further that you have apparently adoopted the newest party line of the conservatives–the supposodly high salaries of public workers. Two comments on that. First of all, you don’t see 30-year olds getting million-dollar bonuses like you do on Wall St. Second of all, the average federal employee salary will be higher than the private sector because there are very few, if any, minimum wage employees at the federal level.

Comment by dempster holland — December 11, 2010 @ 2:32 p.m.

Your comments deserve a response because they reflect the mythos many Americans have built up around unions, but I think this demands a fairly lengthy blog post, so be looking for that in the near future. I will link it here once it is posted.

Also, for the record, I did not go to business school; I was a history major, and I earned almost 70 of my 120 credits in the subject. I barely set foot inside the business school the entire time I was in college. Furthermore, I am not a conservative but a libertarian. In fact, I had an hour long debate with my colleague David Stokes, where I argued that libertarians should not consider themselves allies of conservatives, which you can view here:

http://showmeinstitute.org/publication/id.316/pub_detail.asp

Perhaps you should do some research before you start throwing labels around.

Comment by John Payne — December 11, 2010 @ 3:54 p.m.

Sorry–I just assumed that since youy did not seem to acknowlege fundamental facts about American history, that you must have been a business major. I will look forward to your response on the union issue

Comment by dempster holland — December 11, 2010 @ 4:30 p.m.

First of all, nice Mr. Show reference!

Poverty and affluence are relative. Adam Smith writes about the linen shirt- a person without a linen shirt in the days before linen wasn’t deprived. But as wearing one became the norm, you were impoverished if you couldn’t afford one. Vanderbilt wasn’t rich because he owned the Biltmore, he was considered rich because he had so many things other people didn’t have. That people today have more things than Vanderbilt had in his time is completely irrelevant to any practical concern. The truth is that people today are more relatively deprived than ever when you look at the things that matter: health care, housing, public safety, etc. Who cares if more people have color TVs or some minimum level of comfort when they do not have access to the things that truly allow them to improve their lot? To justify poverty by saying things are better now than they were over 100 years ago is lazy and cold. We have a lot of damn work to do in this country. Government backing off of some things might be part of the answer, but pretending like the problem isn’t there doesn’t help anyone.

Comment by Rob — December 12, 2010 @ 11:46 a.m.

I certainly don’t want to give the impression that I don’t want people to have higher standards of living. I’d like it everyone could live better than they currently do, and I believe that the economic policies I promote would lead to greater material welfare for most people. (You may disagree those ends would flow the means, but that is my sincere belief.) That said, I reject a relative definition of poverty. If poverty is simply defined as the bottom quintile in income or a certain percentage of the median income, then I don’t think we can talk in any meaningful sense about eliminating poverty. Some people will always be poorer than others and some richer–even communism could not eliminate that fact.

That people have more things today than they did in the past is of immense practical concern. The people that have those things, by and large, enjoy them a great deal. It’s easy to dismiss more choices on television, chatting on Facebook, and the like as mere frivolities, but they often add so much to our lives. I have numerous friends that live across the country, and I interact with dozens of them on a regular basis because of Facebook and cell phones. That’s incredible and makes our lives better in a very deep and meaningful way.

I agree that we can make improvements in health care, housing, and public safety, but to say that people are worse off in those measures today than ever before–even in a relative since–is flat out wrong. Although life expectancy dropped slightly this year, the trend has been upwards for a long, long time for all groups. And, yes, those with higher incomes tend to live longer, but the differential between different ethnic groups is narrowing. Crime rates, especially violent crime rates, have dropped pretty steadily and across almost groups since the mid-1990s, and while I believe there are a number of racial biases built into our “criminal justice” system, it’s a far cry from the blatant oppression of minorities that was sanctioned by law less than half a century ago. Before the 1960s, it’s arguable that the police in Mississippi and several other states existed for the sole purpose of holding African-Americans down, and that has improved drastically. The average square footage of homes has risen spectacularly over the past forty years, even for the poor. Rates of divorce, teen pregnancy, and abortion rates have all declined substantially from their peaks. (You can find sources for these claims and more here: http://reason.com/archives/2009/01/01/the-good-news-from-a-bad-year)

Do we still have problems? Yes–massive ones–and we must address them. Please do not believe that I am advising complacence. We can do better, and I believe we will. However, I think it’s important to keep a little perspective and remember that we live better than the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived.

Comment by John Payne — December 12, 2010 @ 2:29 p.m.

Also, Rob, I’d like to post your comment and my reply to my personal blog. Would that be okay with you, and, if so, would you prefer for me to refer to you as Rob or simply as “a commenter”? And thank you so very much for noticing the Mr. Show reference. I will try to work more of them into my posts in the future for you.

Dempster, my question about how you’d like me to refer to you in my forthcoming blog post on unions and rising wages goes for you as well.

Comment by John Payne — December 12, 2010 @ 2:34 p.m.

Post away, but please include this point of clarification on your statistics: the bottom quintile can move. A group with a median income of $50,000 and a bottom quintile with incomes of $1,000 to $5,000 is very different than a group with the same median but whose bottom quintile has incomes of $40,000 to $45,000. We can and should strive for a more even distribution where incomes cluster around the median. This is why many relative definitions of poverty use a proportion of the median: you can have zero earners in a distribution who make less than 50% of the median value.

All poverty is relative- the federal poverty line is relative to the cost of a minimum sustenance diet. The poverty measure you used in your post is relative to the standard of living of 100 years ago. You cannot reject this fact.

Since all poverty is relative and therefore really about equality, you should really read Amartya Sen’s “Inequality Reexamined.” It creates a good understanding of the foundation on which arguments about poverty and equality need to happen. Then it talks about exactly why equality is important (rather than equity) in some ways that you might not expect. Based on the few things of yours I’ve read, I think you would really enjoy and understand it.

Comment by Rob — December 13, 2010 @ 6:41 a.m.

I consent to your posting my comment and your response on your blog. As to your long response on the progress that has been made for average Americans, much of what you say is correct. But doesn’t that show the success of an activist federal government, New Deal policies and liberalism over the past seventy years?

Comment by dempster holland — December 13, 2010 @ 11:19 a.m.

[...] My last post comparing the standard of living of George Vanderbilt with that enjoyed by most Americans today has inspired a fair amount of debate, which has recently centered on the question of what has caused the incredible increase in real wages over the past hundred plus years: free markets or unions and government intervention. Instead of simply writing another comment in the thread, I decided to address this in another full blog post because this question gets to some of the most fundamental differences between those, like myself, who want minimal government control over markets and those who believe that governments need instead to steer markets and engineer desired outcomes. [...]

Pingback by Why Do Wages Increase? « Rough Ol' Boy — December 14, 2010 @ 11:35 a.m.

Here is my post on rising wages:

http://www.showmedaily.org/2010/12/why-do-wages-increase.html

I also plan on responding to some of the more recent points in the near future, but I have some other obligations to attend to for the moment.

Comment by John Payne — December 14, 2010 @ 11:37 a.m.

December 9, 2010