One of the recurring themes among our commentariat is that the disparity in wealth between the haves and the have nots is corrosive to our well-being as a society. The growing gap between the incomes of the rich and the poor, we're often reminded, is a danger to our polity and national cohesion and threatens to result in an upheaval something like the French Revolution.
Well, I don't know what to make of this. I don't know how the disparity between today's rich and poor is relevant or meaningful or particularly disturbing. Wealth and poverty are relative.
To paraphrase Jonah Goldberg in his excellent book Suicide of the West, if everyone was a billionaire except me and I was only a millionaire I'd be poor compared to everyone else, but I think I'd be quite content in my relative impoverishment. Moreover, if everyone's income doubled the gap between us would grow, but I'd still consider myself to be doing pretty well in terms of absolute wealth.
The important consideration is not the gap between us but the benefits of life to which I have access.
What difference does it make, after all, if one person has enough income to be comfortable, but someone else has a hundred times as much? What difference does it make if that gap widens every year as long as the "poorer" person is not regressing in absolute terms?
The inequality that we should be talking about, and rejoicing in, is the inequality between our contemporary poor and those who were wealthy in almost every other period of human history. This inequality is one of the greatest achievements in human history and, though I've written about it before, it bears reiterating.
I say we should rejoice because, although it may sound "insensitive" to say it, our poor are astonishingly wealthy, at least in material goods, compared to almost everyone else who has ever lived, including even the wealthiest aristocrats.
A multi-millionaire from a hundred and fifty years ago may have had enormous wealth but there was relatively little he could buy with it. He actually had a lot less and in many ways his life was a lot harder than is the case for most Americans living below the poverty line today.
The rich had more and bigger houses than do today's American poor, of course, and lived in safer neighborhoods, but that's about it. Those houses were not air-conditioned and often indifferently heated. They didn't have running water or flush toilets. Nor were they blessed with electricity, artificial light, refrigeration, television, radio, or a bevy of labor-saving appliances and devices.
The rich couldn't listen to music any time they wanted nor watch movies or television news. They didn't have telephones much less cell-phones, nor did they have computers or the internet to facilitate communication and learning.
Their clothes were certainly less comfortable and in many ways more poorly crafted. They couldn't get food, paid for by the taxpayer, by walking to the corner supermarket at any time of the day or night, where the choices and variety would astonish someone transplanted from the late 1800s.
They could afford the best medical and dental care of the day, but the best care was nowhere near as good nor as convenient as what is available today, even to our poor, whose bills are paid by medicaid. The poor today have access to a plethora of medications undreamt of by the wealthy of the 19th century - aspirin, penicillin, novocaine, blood pressure medicine, depression medicine, etc. - all of which make life infinitely better than it was for the rich 150 years ago.
Today's poor are much more mobile thanks to public transportation, than were the earlier rich who had to rely on carriages drawn by horses which needed to be maintained, and the roads they traveled were often either ridden with potholes, dusty, muddy, or otherwise treacherous.
The rich had vacation villas, but it took lengthy train and carriage rides in hot, dirty uncomfortable conveyances over those miserable roads to get there. Poor families today often have access to an air-conditioned car that can get them to the beach for a day's recreation in relative comfort, on excellent highways, and with relative speed.
Today's poor have access to free education and public libraries. They're almost all at least somewhat literate, they live longer and much more comfortably than did even the richest people throughout all of human history save the last century or so.
Relative to the wealthier classes today our poor may seem to have little, but they're immeasurably rich relative to the unfortunate "wealthy" wretches who happened to be born a century and a half or more earlier. Indeed, if a contemporary member of the lower economic classes were transported back in time, but able somehow to live like they can live today, their neighbors would marvel at their extravagance and quality of life.
All of this is often simply taken for granted, but it shouldn't be. It's part of what Goldberg calls The Miracle of the last century and a half. Today's poor are, generally speaking, incomprehensibly well off, in material terms, compared to anyone who lived prior to the 20th century.None of this is to say that modern poor people don't have needs that must be addressed, but it is to say that the claim that our system is unjust because there's a gap between rich and poor is hard to credit.
So, the next time someone in your hearing complains about the unfairness of the disparity between rich and poor in this country you might ask them what it is, exactly, that's unfair about it.
