Here’s a question. Would you rather be living in 1969 or 2009? By almost any economic measure people in the U.S. are richer than they were forty years ago. This applies to all levels of income. Carpe Diem has all the boring details.
I should add that cell phones, computers, microwaves, the internet, air conditioning, HD TV, and every other device Americans can’t seem to live without are products of our free market. The government didn’t create these devices or make them cheaper. Government intervention only leads to stagnation which kills innovation and progress.
A common argument I read through the blogosphere about the perceived economic crisis is that Americans have been getting poorer for decades. This argument is usually justified by a lack of understanding about the statistics of real wage growth and income. The problem here is that many of the left do not understand poverty. Perhaps that’s why they feel so much guilt about it. It’s strange then that they give less to charity than those evil conservatives. Anyway, that’s a separate topic. Despite the gloom and doom from the left about the lack of economic progress the wealth of poorest fifth has increased. Nicholas Eberstadt’s recent book makes the point better than me.
Consider: In 1973 over half the families in America’s poorest fifth didn’t own a car. By 2003 over 73% of them owned some sort of motor vehicle–and 14% had two cars or more. By the same token, about 27% of American children below the poverty line failed to see a doctor annually in 1985; 20 years later, the figure was 11%. Thus poor children nowadays are more likely to have an annual doctor visit than nonpoor kids a few years ago. What is wrong with the official poverty rate? It measures the wrong thing–and always has. That thing is income.
My point isn’t to diminish that problem of poverty, but to highlight the immense progress that has been made. For three straight years when I was a teenager I attended a week long summer camp called Carolina Cross Connection. The purpose of this camp was to work on impoverished homes in rural Appalachia. Many of the people whose homes we worked on were elderly. The level of poverty is much higher for these people than it is for people living closer to cities. That type of poverty was much higher just three decades ago. Fortunately fewer people are living in those conditions today. Capitalism isn’t broke and the alternatives are much worse. It’s ridiculous to let one dip in the business cycle serve as a justification for wholesale changes to our economy and it’s ignorant to suggest that we’re not making progress eliminating poverty.
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