There is a battle going on among right-wing intellectuals regarding the condition of American workers and the role of the state in improving it. On the one hand, the Reaganite faction argues that workers are doing just fine, thank you, and that state intervention in the economy to help them is dangerous and counterproductive. On the other hand, the national conservatives see a working class that needs lots of government help. Who is right here?
Ross Douthat wants to bridge the gap between the two factions so they can focus their energy on what really matters–banning abortion, driving gay people back into the closet, and encouraging trans people to kill themselves. He uses a graphic prepared by a guy at the AEI to show that things are improving for working people, but aren’t perfect. His conclusion is that there is plenty of room for better policy in the GOP, but workers are better off than they think they are, so they should eschew populist economics and get behind social conservatism.
My reactions to the analysis and the graphic are as follows:
- There are lots of different ways to measure income. It actually probably makes more sense to measure wealth, given that the wealthy rely more on capital gains than income to better their condition. In any event, the AEI has a distinct ideological bias, so without a lot of information regarding methodology, I’m not inclined to accept the graph as fact.
- There are two significant items missing from the graph. First, it only shows the conditions of American workers after 1970, which avoids making the contrast between significant income increases prior to that date and the outcome of neoliberal policies. Second, it doesn’t show how American capitalists fared during the timeframe of the graph. Even The Economist concedes that inequality in America rose substantially during the relevant time period.
- I suspect that the guy who created the graph included the value of health insurance in his income figures. If so, the soaring cost of health care actually represents a benefit to the American worker. Spoiler alert–in the real world, that isn’t true.
- Changes to the tax code that helped American workers were opposed by the AEI. Relying on them to make a case for avoiding future transfers of wealth is hypocritical and obnoxious.
- The graph, as you would expect, doesn’t distinguish between workers in growing industries and workers in dying ones. It is the latter that have generated most of the publicity and the interest of reactionary intellectuals. The mainstream right, however, has offered the losers of technological change and globalization nothing but racial and gender resentment and nostalgia for their dearly departed jobs.
In short, if you look at the larger picture, the populist reactionaries have a better case than Douthat allows.