They can eat brioche
This is…so American.
Ask them what they think the federal minimum wage is.
And that’s why we have the terrible, ludicrous politics we have, including the massive gap between rich and poor.
Even NPR reporters are bad at it.
Tip Jar
This has been my experience, as well. Even here in rural Nebraska, where most of my students are working class, they assume that the average is way over $100,000. This in spite of the fact that NO ONE in the classroom makes anywhere near that much (well, if I were to stick around another 20 years, I MIGHT get to that amount…or not). I consider myself in the category of middle class, with a comfortable life style and an income that can support it, but I am aware that most of the people at my school consider themselves working class (never mind that being a college instructor automatically moves you out of the working class if you were ever there). They also believe that the average income is way up there.
Reminds me of a doctor I had once who wanted me to join a gym. I was on disability and food stamps at the time. He was incredulous when I told him I couldn’t afford it. “Everyone can afford $25 a month”, says he. Sure, I could have afforded it…if I stopped paying my water bill. I think I needed water more than a gym, since I am capable of exercising without a gym. I will admit, being anorexic at the time did save me a lot on food, but I was also raising a teenage son.
There’s just so much incongruence, because at the same time many of these people will argue against raising the minimum wage to $15.00 her hour (approx 30k per year.) They must be putting on their thinking gaps.
I’m surprised that the average salary is $45k; that seems high. I’m wondering if she meant median. Turning to the Great Google, I find that is likely indeed the case. “The average annual wage in 2019 in the US was $51,916.27, and the median annual wage was $34,248.45” states one probably-respectable source.
I assumed average was median rather than mean; high incomes distort the mean too much. Income statistics almost always seem to be about median averages.
The bottom image is about “middle class”, an unfortunate term that is defined sometimes extremely broadly: this 2018 Pew Research report had some enlightening information about what constitutes “middle income” in the US, a term that currently covers around half the population. We know the Republicans want an even broader span of “middle class” so they can introduce legislation to help the top end of that span under the guise of helping the “middle class”, but they are off by a factor of more than two here, even in the most generous interpretation.
I’m reminded of Trump’s comment that he received from his father “a small loan of a million dollars”.
I hate the fact that Dem/”liberal” language now is always about “the middle class” as opposed to the working class or the poor. The latter have obviously become radioactive, but Dems and liberals should have defied that rather than giving in to it.
Indeed, and it was one of our favorite authors, Paul Fussell, who “wrote the book” on class, titled (guess) Class, and expounded on the uniquely American pathology of ignoring it.
I need to read that again.
@#5:
That seems odd to me because around here, no one wants to admit being middle class. The college faculty insist on being classed in the working class because they see “middle class” as an elitist class they don’t want to admit being in.
Still, that is probably a regional thing, and I do see a lot about the middle class in rhetoric by the Democrats.
Well good for them. That’s the best thing you’ve told us about them.
“The college faculty insist on being classed in the working class because they see “middle class” as an elitist class they don’t want to admit being in.”
Gosh, that’s funny, given their six-digit salaries.
Me, I’m adjunct. I make a cool five figures. ;-]
I’m always annoyed by that ‘well most people don’t know that’ argument–that may be true, maybe most people wouldn’t know it–but if you’re in business school it is your job to know things like this. It reminds me of people who argued in support of police who shoot unarmed Black men, ‘well most people would be afraid if they encountered a scary-looking Black man, wouldn’t you?’–whether that’s true or not, the police shouldn’t be ‘most people’, they’re supposed to be trained to keep their cool in threatening situations. If they can’t do that maybe they’re in the wrong job.
And of course there was Ann Romney’s claim that she knew what it was like to struggle financially because as a young couple they’d been so hard up that ‘Mitt had to sell some of his shares’ (I paraphrase)
It’s interesting that people seem to hold contrary positions on income, and lifestyle more generally, at the same time. On the one hand we’re very anchored to our own experience in setting norms. I remember a friend of mine flatly refusing to believe that the average salary in the uk was £22,000, (this was almost 20 years ago) which he dismissed by gesturing at a large group of our friends and saying “none of us make that”. The fact that we were 18 and 19 and largely working as apprentices or in entry level service sector jobs, or that a group of school friends aren’t a representative sample of society as a whole, did nothing to dissuade him. In the same vein Nicholas Nassim Taleb has a typically self aggrandizing anecdote about earning millions working on Wall Street, being aware that he was well inside the top 1% of earners, but feeling very self conscious around more successful traders who had private helicopters rather than mere Ferraris.
On the other hand we’re quick to soak up cultural clues about what’s normal or what we can reasonably expect. I’ve read someone (possibly someone here?) making the point that television programmes are generally about wealthy people, which gives us a distorted sense of how common it is to be very wealthy, and that even poor people on TV generally don’t have poor people’s problems. In the early series of Friends they’re all doing jobs like waitress and busker, yet they have massive flats, take holidays, eat out regularly and never really seem to need to go to work. There are plenty of programmes where characters lose their job only to find another one immediately without getting into arrears on their rent. If everyone you know is fairly comfortable in real life that’s bound to create some level of distortion in your perception on what it’s like to be badly paid.
In a similar vein as that WSJ illustration, I remember a blogger who was a University of Chicago professor lamenting that the Obama tax cuts were really going to hit hard, and he and his wife were not well-off on their $400k+ income. You see, after paying for the mortgage on their large home in a prestigious Chicago neighborhood, multiple luxury vehicles, private school tuition for the kids, the nanny, gardener, and housekeeper, 401(k) contributions, an annual overseas vacation, etc…. why, there wasn’t much left!
Some people think that unless they’re swimming in a vault of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck, they can’t possibly be well-off.
@Djolaman;
I remember reading an article which tracked the changes in the way US television portrayed Ordinary Folk Like You. Jackie Gleason and his wife lived in a small apartment. So did the Ricardos who, like the former couple, had best friend neighbors who lived in the same building. Even the suburban homes of Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best were relatively modest, as was the tract ranches owned by the Petries and the Stevens. Things started moving upwards in the 80’s and more or less stayed there. Not just a house, but a big house. It skewed the way people imagined “average” was.
I know I’ve mentioned the book before, but Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence, by Rachel Sherman (review here) was rather illuminating to me (and to some degree familiar) regarding how affluent people see themselves, who they compare themselves against, what they think “wealthy” means, what constitutes “cutting back”, and various other aspects of their moral compasses. (“I’m not really wealthy, not compared to those other people” was a common sentiment.)
In fairness, I think many of us would feel distress on having to make financial adjustments we never expected to have to make, to do without things we thought we’d always have, even if other people have never had those things in the first place. It depends what you’re used to.
Sastra @ 14, YES, that – I’ve been interested in that shift since forever. The apartment in The Honeymooners was TINY – a kitchen and a bedroom, end of story. The kitchen wasn’t big, either, and it sure as hell wasn’t fancy.
In a WaPo article on the Wharton School discussion:
Yeah, I think that’s where my thoughts on the topic were headed. I didn’t think that Wharton students, or business school students in general, might be expected to know this information any better than other people.
Regarding portrayals of low income living on tv, shows developed in the UK seem to be much more accurate. Contrast Friends with say, Peep Show. I suspect the difference derives from the greatly different budgets the studios have. An American show will build multiple permanent sets, usually spacious enough for a large crew and well lit for ideal photography; a British show will rent an actual flat and cope with the cramped space by having a small crew, and dingy lighting with some portable lights – if they change the lighting at all.
Statistical measures of income inequality in economics can be quite literally unrealistic.
In economics, the Gini coefficient, sometimes called the Gini index or Gini ratio, is a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income inequality or wealth inequality within a nation or any other group of people. … The measure is not overly sensitive to the specifics of the income distribution [sic].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
If inequality from depression is measured by the Gini coefficient the rich will have lost more-say income reduced to $500,000 from $600,000–than the poor–say a reduction to $300 from $500. So ‘inequality’ has been reduced but it’s existentially devastating for the poor.
(thx to Doug Saunders
To a degree inequality isn’t the problem, it’s the fact that life for people at the lower end of the distribution is extremely difficult. A society where the poorest have the lifestyle that you could afford on £100,000 a year in the real world while the richest have Jeff Bezos money seems to me to be preferable to one where everyone is teetering on the edge of homelessness and starvation, although clearly it’s less equal. Of course there’s a question about whether society A is sustainable- do the super rich use their monopoly of wealth to also commandeer disproportionate power and influence and use it to gradually tip the scales further in their favour, immiserating the less wealth and squeezing ever more from them? Seems likely.
I take the point about British TV but I think that unless the characters’ money issues are part of the plot (or as in Peep Show or People Just Do Nothing the mundanity of the surrounds is part of the joke,) there’s still a disproportionate number of programmes set in large detached houses in city centre locations. I’d guess (and I am only guessing ) that that same process of gradual gentrification of the dramatic setting mentioned by Sastra above has occurred here – compare Only Fools and Horses, Coronation Street or Steptoe and Son to Cold Feet, Last Tango in Halifax or Killing Eve
And the Kramdens on “The Honeymooners” shared a telephone with the Nortons upstairs — not a “party line” with a telephone in each apartment (and a different ring pattern for incoming calls to either residence) — but a single telephone instrument, which Ed or Trixie would lower from their window on its wire when the Kramdens needed to use it.
Oh great detail. I didn’t know that. I’ve just always been struck when watching clips by the poverty of that apartment and how alien it is to tv world now. Honestly I hope NYC bus drivers can do better than that now – it’s a demanding and important job.