Will the fact of economic inequality trickle down like the economics that created it?

Andrea Batista Schlesinger

Will the fact of economic inequality trickle down like the economics that created it?

I got a phone call the other day. Well, not one. Approximately 35.

Roberta got her hands on a recent report of the organization I work for, which graded members of Congress based on their votes on legislation of importance to the current and aspiring middle class, and she was angry.

She was angry that we didn't support tax cuts for the wealthy, angry about our advocacy for an increase in the minimum wage, angry about our rejection of a bankruptcy bill written by the credit card industry. Roberta was 35 calls and 10 voice mails angry.

It felt ironic to have this conversation with Roberta, a working-class Republican from Pennsylvania who didn't graduate from college but worked hard at minimum wage jobs, on the same day as the first speech by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.
The position of Treasury Secretary for this White House is often characterized as chief public relations officer, which made Paulson's remarks all the more striking. While making a case for the overall strength of the economy, he also acknowledged that "Many Americans simply aren't feeling the benefits. Many aren't seeing significant increases in their take-home pay. Their increases in wages are being eaten up by high energy prices and rising health-care costs, among others."

It's not just "many," it's most. Poll after poll reveals Americans' profound anxiety about the state of the economy.

So why the anger? My hunch is that it's because Roberta is proud of what she's managed to accomplish despite tough economic circumstances. And she should be. Like my parents, she started with little and worked her way up into a position from which she could raise her family with pride. How do we confront the challenges of today's economy while acknowledging the people like Roberta who have worked hard deserve to be addressed with dignity?

Telling everyone that we are all doomed isn't the answer. I'm tired of professional doomsayers declaring the American Dream dead. It is precisely because we see that the Dream is possible that we fight for it.

But, yes, it is too hard to achieve, and too hard to maintain. The Dream is so fragile that with one accident or health care crisis, it's gone. One pink slip for Roberta's husband, and it's gone.

After Roberta called, I better understood my challenge. We cannot create a tipping point in our consciousness until Roberta can both be recognized for how hard she has worked and feel in solidarity with the factory worker whose job was offshored, the couple who had to apply for bankruptcy because one of them got really sick, the dad who can't figure out how to send his kid to college because public university tuition has gone up nearly 50% in the last four years.

Our challenges fall on a continuum, and none of them are inevitable. The poor American struggles to move up, the middle-class American struggles to hold on. As economist Jared Bernstein puts it, there are two models: YOYO economics - You're On Your Own - or WITT-- We're In This Together. Until I can make a successful argument to Roberta that she is part of the "we," we're all on our own.

Andrea Batista Schlesinger: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 8:39 AM, Aug 12, 2006 in Economic Opportunity
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Comments

thanks, andrea, for this blog. an important theme in your blog is economic equality and how we go about achieving it. this theme begs a broad national on going discussion. so often
"profound economic anxiety" lends itself to quick answers that tend to repeat the mistakes of the past rather than incorporate lessons learned. ten years ago we had extreme economic insecurity..one of the conservative 'solutions ' was 'welfare reform'. a bit of a sleight of hand considering how porrly the average american has fared economically since 1996.

to make changes, real changes that don't repeat the past negative results, we need to be bold. i think dmi's report card can help us demand bold leadership from our reps.

The sad fact of life is that Roberta is not thinking about a fact of the global economic miracle that is going to profoundly effect all of us, and that is commoditization (and automation)

Not everybody has a world class education. Not everybody has the capital to build a business that addresses a niche so effectively that it puts everyone else serving that niche out of business.

Not everybody has the brains to design *automation* products that make businesses so efficient that they can run without people.

Not everybody understands the imperative of Moore's Law or the fact that 90% of all jobs are scriptable and will eventually be automated. Most within the next 20 years. Including driving, most agricultural jobs and even many high tech areas like networking. (see http://www.zeroconf.org/ for example)

This is the way of the future. It is the goal of technology to eliminate as much human drudge labor as possible. This WILL happen. It's not political, in the sense that it won't be stopped by people. It can't be stopped just as we can't uninvent the nuclear bomb, for example.

Technology will make huge numbers of people unemployable for any price, unless they are the very best at what they do. The competition for the remaining 20th century style jobs will be very fierce. Its a process that has been going on for a long time and its why working people are finding that the strike has much less power than it once did. Bluntly, businesses don't need labor in the way they used to.

Except as consumers. And they don't care where their customers are, as long as they have money.

American workers are not ready to compete in the global marketplace on a level playing field unless their education level increases and their cost of living goes down.

America must also commit to becoming a world leader in automation technology to preserve the industrial base we have, or it will atrophy and millions of 21st century jobs will be created elsewhere.

That means allowing US salaries to rise, something the GOP is adamant at stopping. Increased labor costs in the US will make the creation of a local robotics industry economically viable. Cheap labor makes it unable to take hold here, not unlike the fact that the Roman Empire's dependence on slaves crippled technological innovation there for hundreds of years.