PowerLine's readers work over a recent column by the New York Times'
Paul Krugman like piranha stripping clean a side of beef.
Krugman's article was erected around the claim that "Working families have seen little, if any, progress over the past 30 years." This assertion seems silly on the face of it, and a number of bloggers, including PowerLine, offered rebuttals. These posts elicited, in turn, comments from readers, many of which were quite thoughtful. One response in particular deserves special note. Responding to Hindrocket of PowerLine Dafydd ab Hugh replied:
You wrote that "the Census Bureau data show that for the category "Married-Couple Families," median income went from $46,723 in 1973 to $62,281 in 2003. (All numbers are in constant 2003 dollars.) That's a hefty 33% increase in real income."
With all due respect, Hindrocket, that's bullpuckey. The increase in "real income" would be hundreds of times that 33%, once you take into account the value of what you can now buy. Riddle me this:
* In 1973, how many households could afford a desktop computer with hundreds of megabytes of RAM? Ans: none.
* How many could afford a portable telephone that fits in a pocket? Or for that matter, how about a portable computer terminal? Ans: none.
* How many could afford to have genetic diseases in their children repaired by gene therapy? Ans: none.
* How many childless couples could afford in-vitro fertilization? Ans: none.
* How many could afford to have diseases diagnosed with Positron Emission Tomography or treated by laser surgery? How many could afford to have Lasik corrective eye surgery? How many could afford to have depression or anxiety cured or controlled by selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox or Celexa? How many could afford to have their teeth repaired by composite resin fillings? How many could afford laser microsurgery, radio-telemetry surgery, foetal-abnormality surgery, minimally-invasive surgery, robotic surgery, or "beating heart" cardiac surgery? Ans: none.
* How many could afford to start their own "magazines" that could be read by tens or hundreds of thousands of people each week without even being distributed? Ans: none.
* How many could afford a luxury family vehicle suitable for offroading adventures? Ans: none.
* How many breadwinners could afford to telecommute? Ans: none.
* How many could afford a Mint Mocha Chip Frappuccino? How many could buy fat-free potato chips? How many could afford NutraSweet? How about lactose-free milk? How many could afford to go out routinely for Pad Thai, Japanese sushi, Armenian khorovatz, Ethiopian aleecha, Chorizo Argentino, Lebanese hummus and shawarma, or even a nice, simple blueberry bagel? Ans: none.
The point should be clear: it is impossible to legitimately compare buying power in 1973 with buying power today, for the simple reason that a huge proportion of what we buy today simply did not even exist thirty years ago. This is more obvious when you try to compare today's economy with the economy of the Middle Ages: the strides in technology and society are so staggering, they swamp any attempted calculation of monetary value: how many emperors in A.D. 750 could afford antibiotics?
Claiming that "working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years," as Krugman claimed, is so manifestly preposterous -- even before taking economics into account -- that I don't question his veracity so much as his sanity. Is he mentally ill?
We had a couple of additional thoughts on this question of middle class progress. For example, although it was around in the 70s, relatively few middle class families had central air conditioning back then. In our opinion, the air conditioning of America has done more to improve the quality of middle (and lower) class life than most of the items on Dafydd's tally. We might also add to his list access to health information like the hazards of tobacco and high fat diets which has made life better for those who avail themselves of it and act upon it. Moreover, anti-inflammatory and cholesterol lowering drugs like Ibuprofen and statins have greatly enhanced the quality of life of many middle class families in the last couple of decades. Nor should we neglect the emergence of cable television and VHS and DVD formats of entertainment.
We're confident that our readers can come up with more examples of how life is better for middle class citizens today than it was thirty years ago.
People like Krugman don't see all these developments as progress because they only consider economic advancement in terms relative to the wealthy. In other words, if the lives of middle class families are improving in numerous ways, that progress is negated by the fact that the middle class still doesn't make as much money as the upper classes. How else to explain a claim so clearly counter to the facts as Krugman's that the middle class has seen little, if any, progress over the last thirty years?
At any rate another good reply to Mr. Krugman's claim can be found here.
One of the beauties of blogs is that five years ago the only way to expose nonsense like the sort that Paul Krugman dispenses was to fire off a letter to the editor which would probably never get published or would be so severely edited as to render it ineffectual. No longer. Now when someone like Krugman writes something ridiculous, which seems to happen with astonishing regularity, it's immediately amplified and rebutted by the pirhanas in the blogosphere. We're all better off for it.