Cliffnotes of the Zeitgiest Part XXIX. The Income Inequality Edition.
Starting a storm in the Twitterverse
Wharton professor Nina Strohminger did just that when she asked her students about what average incomes were like.
She posted it on Twitter.
I asked Wharton students what they thought the average American worker makes per year and 25% of them thought it was over six figures. One of them thought it was $800k. Really not sure what to make of this (The real number is $45k)
Some interesting replies resulted from this, this one from somebody who is now apparently an "oil acquisition attorney", but who seems to be expressing some deep regrets otherwise about the state of his/her life if you look up their Twitter feed:
As an alum I’m curious what you expect of students. They’re looking at the segment of the world they’ll occupy. Is that wrong - for 18-22 yr olds at a competitive place like Wharton to be narrowly focused? Do you really expect them to care about wealth inequality etc right now?
And the response to that one:
Wharton students aren't undergrads. This is an MBA program, so your age range is likely a little off. Regardless, fucking-a right I "expect them to care about wealth inequity etc. right now."
Without using the 1980s barracks room vocabulary, that's more of my view, I'd note. I expect them to care as well.
Robert Reich cares, and has a sting of videos on this, this being one of them.
Generally, establishment Republicans really hate the Reich videos. Ironically, the populist Republicans, many of whom were Democrats not all that long ago, would have loved them when they were Democrats. They probably hate them now, however, as they seem to have fallen in line on this sort of thing for some reason.
But there's more than a little to this.
We've posed on this topic before, but things are getting wildly out of whack, and COVID has emphasized that. Suffice it to say, a nation in which very few have most of the wealth won't be stably democratic for long. It'll head into a certain sort of mobism, or it'll end up on an oligarchy, the latter of which are not stable long term.
It'all also be a nation where most of the jobs, no matter what they pay, will be dispiriting for most people.
Wharton and other schools.
I don't know what to make of Wharton in general, I'll note.
Or rather, perhaps I mean its graduates.
It has a fantastic reputation as a school, and one of my close relatives is a graduate of it. Based upon that, I tended to hold it in very high respect.
Since that time, however, its reputation with me has become a bit dented, probably mostly due to politics. That's probably unfair. The school could give you an excellent business education, and not mean that you come out as a politician that everyone admires or have political views that everyone respects.
I'm sure going there, however, is money well spent.
Not Wharton, but this reminded me of a Wall Street Journal headline I saw. I can't read the article due to the paywall.
NYU Is Top-Ranked—In Loans That Alumni and Parents Struggle to Repay
By many measures, the elite Manhattan school is the worst or among the worst for leaving families and graduate students drowning in debt; ‘It feels like I’m kind of trapped’
She probably feels trapped because she's trapped.
The Journal recently ran this article on a similar theme.
‘Financially Hobbled for Life’: The Elite Master’s Degrees That Don’t Pay Off
Columbia and other top universities push master’s programs that fail to generate enough income for graduates to keep up with six-figure federal loans
Well, at least there's always the FFL.
The Migrant Concession and Inflation
An interesting accidental concession occurred a week ago on Meet The Press when Chuck Todd closed out the show noting that legal immigration into the US is way, way, down. Todd, whose role isn't really supposed to be editorializing, nonetheless did and made the connection between low migration (which still is high by the standards of most nations) and wages.
Yikes.
For eons, Americans have been told that immigrants take jobs that "nobody else will". Todd's concession basically admits that Americans will take them, if they pay a decent wage.
That's a huge concession.
Indeed, what that essentially indicates that much of the current inflation is in reality the economy adjusting to the decline in wage depression through paying immigrants, legal and illegal, low wages.
Everyone who ever looked at this honestly already knew that this was the case. There are next to no jobs that Americans won't take. Rather, there are jobs that Americans can't take as we've exported them overseas or won't take as we've depressed the wages so low they'll only be taken by the scared and desperate.
This is particularly the case with illegal immigration, a feature of which is dirty jobs at low wages.
So it turns out that Americans will work these jobs, but in the post COVID economy lots of Americans who were already at the bottom end of the economic latter have, probably purely accidentally, joined hands with lots of Americans who were under employed, and told the nation to "screw you and the horse you rode in on" for keeping wages in the basement.
Rising wages will cause prices to climb, but this isn't quite the same sort of inflation that we experienced in the 1970s and 1980s. Rather, this is a readjustment. What might occur here is that it will depress the economy somewhat, but basically force it back into the 1950s model. People will have more income, but will buy less.
Frankly, overall, that's a good thing. Since the Second World War we've created a pure consumption economy that's anti family and hostile to those who don't want to get degrees to become cubicle dwellers. The giant reaction by the formerly blue collar was already going on pre COVID, but now it's really going on at a massive scale.
The solution for this isn't to flood the market with desperate Guatemalans, but rather to pay actual decent wages. There's a chance that this might actualy come about.
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