I need to write up a good old days summary, because every time I hear about how the American middle class is shrinking, it reminds me of how much the Russian middle class never grew. And if there's anything moral to be said about the decrease in wealth and earning power of Americans, then it stands to be moral universally. So what I'm thinking about are all the Russians and Indians I work with in my industry (computing) and how hard they work without whining.
I'm talking about what was middle class when I was a kid.
1 car (with manual transmission, windows and no air conditioning or air bags)
1 bathroom in the house
bunk beds - 2 or 3 kids per bedroom
no dishwasher
no air conditioning
no microwave
1 television
1 refrigerator
2 weeks vacation per year.
So let America shrink to that, and what do you have? America. But while I'm thinking about it, let me think back a little more about the inconveniences we had to put up with when we were in the small old days middle class. Trashcans were made of steel and after two years they rusted out at the bottom. Then you bought an aluminum one. After that came the plastic cans. If there were roaches in your neighborhood, you bought Black Flag, in a steel container that was separate from the sprayer. You refilled things like hurricane lamps to save electricity. We had a tub and a shower, but our shower broke and it became a closet. How many years could we not afford a plumber? All of high school for me. I took baths.
We wanted luxuries like Dixie cup dispensers in the bathroom, and a Sparkletts water cooler in the kitchen. Every blue moon we would get Underwood Deviled Ham or Chicken of the Sea, brand name canned meats. Those were special. How long did we wear our shoes? Until they talked. How many times did we patch the knees on our Sears Toughskins? Not quite as many times as we patched the innertubes on our bicycles. We sewed new buttons on old shirts, and moved the ones on our jacket sleeves to our jacket fronts.
Dad did his own tune-ups on the car and complained about the price of points and plugs. We begged him to put Champion spark plugs in, or buy a can of STP. We played ball and if we broke a neighbor's window, it was a big deal. So we had to replace it. That meant scraping from our allowance and going to the hardware store with the measurements for the pane of glass and getting that old putty to soften up a bit.
We made rubber band guns and go-carts. If you were the kid with shopping cart wheels or clothespins, you were wealthy. We knew how to take apart the back rims of our Schwinn Stingray clones and beg the man at the mechanic's place for a handful of grease for the Bendix coaster brakes. The lady around the corner grew tomatos. The lady next door grew greens, and fruit trees were jealously protected from marauding kids. There were stray dogs all around the neighborhood.
We painted things, and when the walls got too ugly for paint, we glued paneling up. We had a washer and dryer but not until 1967. I know what a washboard looks like and how to use one. I know how to hang clothes on the line, and why our mothers especially hated rainy weather.
There are a thousand little things that told us we had not yet made it in America, a thousand things we paid attention to and grunted our way forward for. And gradually they came by the dozen. Hey, we got some Jello 1-2-3. Hey, I can afford studs for my jean jacket. Hey, we bought a second Monopoly game and now I can be the car again. Hey look, powder blue wristbands and puka shells. Then it became ridiculous. I mean who would buy a Nerf football when you could buy a real one signed by Johnny Unitas? But we bought Nerf and Frisbee and Hula Hoop and Silly Putty and Easy Bake and Spirograph. And then a Daisy BB gun. And then an actual mini bike. And then a ten speed. By the time I was 19, I could afford two turntables, a microphone and a motorcycle. Things changed from the 70s to the 80s and soon we were singing Howard Jones.
Next we carom off this remarkable paragraph from Niall Ferguson.
In the post-war United States the consumer society became a phenomenon of the masses, significantly diminishing the sartorial differences between the social classes. This was part of a generalized levelling up that followed the war. In 1928 the top 1 per cent of the population had received nearly 20 per cent of income. From 1952 until 1982 it was consistently less than 9 per cent, below the equivalent share going to the top 1 per cent in France.85 Better educational opportunities for the returning soldiers coupled with a wave of house-building in the suburbs translated into a marked improvement in the quality of life. The parents of the baby boomers were the first generation to have significant access to consumer credit. They bought their homes on credit, their cars on credit and their household appliances – refrigerators, televisions and washing machines – on credit.86 In 1930, as the Depression struck, more than half of American households had electricity, an automobile and a refrigerator. By 1960 around 80 per cent of Americans not only had these amenities, they also had telephones. And the speed with which the new consumer durables spread just kept rising. The clothes-washing machine was a pre-Depression invention dating back to 1926. By 1965, thirty-nine years later, half of households had one. Air conditioning was invented in 1945. It passed the 50 per cent mark in 1974, twenty-nine years later. The clothes dryer came along in 1949; it passed the halfway mark in 1972, twenty-three years later. (The dishwasher, also invented in 1949, was slower to take off; it was not until 1997 that every second household owned one.) Colour television broke all records; invented in 1959, it was in half of all homes by 1973, just fourteen years later. By 1989, when the Cold War effectively ended, two-thirds or more of all Americans had all of these things, with the exception of the dishwasher. They had also acquired microwave ovens (invented in 1972) and video cassette recorders (1977). Fifteen per cent already had the personal computer (1978). A pioneering 2 per cent owned mobile telephones. By the end of the millennium these, too, were in half of all homes, as was the internet.87 To societies for whom this trajectory seemed attainable, the appeal of Soviet communism quickly
Ferguson, Niall (2011-11-01). Civilization: The West and the Rest (pp. 252-253). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.
How does the American Dream materialize? How can I be made to feel good about my life through these conveniences my family aggregated? On the other side of affluence these questions are easy to answer. I know which of these things had value and which did not. I have been satiated through the wonder of signifying wealth, those tokens and fetishes that, aside from their marginal quality, confer social status among the millions who too were short the thousand things. But even before affluence it wasn't as if we didn't have Christianity to remind us how material things could not satisfy our souls. There were millions of people singing Beatles lyrics about love and sunshine, and there was actual love and actual sunshine. We knew how to be happy no matter what Mr Monopoly was doing on the Upper West Side.
When things went pear shaped in 07 I was somewhere near the car industry. At some point I wrote down the impact. We lost 40% of the market for new cars. Down to 9 million from 16 million. Suddenly it occurred to me, that we could survive if we were forced to by circumstances.
This is from this year. This is how people boggle at American wealth, here in our recession.
Treatment of dogs. At least until the 1980s in Guyana, dog food was not a thing that existed. Dogs got table scraps and mostly were outside. They are surprised by how in America, people actually avoid feeding their dog “people food”.
The amount of food Americans waste. My grandma to this day remembers a story about when she came to teach in California in the 1970s. The students used to get apples along with their lunch. Nobody ate them, so they’d just throw them away or leave them at the tables. My grandma was shocked at how they were able to just throw out good food like that, and that no other teachers cared.
Yes we have a dog food industry.
This evening I took a tour of Khatmandu via video. It stays with me.
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