What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it. –Andy Warhol
Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort. [...] [T]he capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses. –Joseph Schumpeter*
Partial list of goods and services that the Forbes 400 cannot have a better version of today than can the middle class in the U.S.—measured by quality, effectiveness, or status:
- Mobile phones
- Umbrellas
- Personal computers
- Toilet paper (notice how it required a pandemic and government intervention to make this temporarily drop off the list)
- Cloud storage
- Fast food and fast casual
- Casual clothing
- Payment processing
- Individual consumer-level tools (but not tool collections)
- Basic plumbing
- Video and music entertainment content
- Online shopping (especially important in quarantines)
- Corrective eye surgery such as LASIK
- Small package shipping speed
- Email
- All but the most exotic of beverages from bottled water to soft drinks to tea to coffee to beer to wine to liquor
- ... I could go on and on, but Qwern already has done so for me...
This shouldn't be surprising given that I am, as most of us so fortunately are, richer than Rockefeller.
Related question: As a proportion of all goods and services available, are there more or fewer things like this today than there were 50, 100, 500, 1000, etc. years ago? I would submit that there are considerably more even with all the abundance and variety that we enjoy today. In the past the inequality separation between the super rich and the middle class (or closest approximation) was vastly larger. Add to that the fact that movement between classes was virtually impossible. It is telling that only in a modern fairy tale are lyrics like this conceivable. Today we enjoy the hockey stick of human progress.
Understanding what is going on here takes more nuance than the typical person allows. Russ Roberts has a good, short video series that explores this nuance.
*The paper at this link, Manifesto for a Humane True Libertarianism by Deirdre McCloskey, is well worth reading. It is where I most recently read the Schumpeter quote.
No comments:
Post a Comment