And Let's Pile on Matt

I second what l-t c said regarding Yglesias's fairly glib claim that we are richer today than in 1999.  As l-t c notes, median income has fallen during that twelve year period, a pretty stunning fact in and of itself.

But I would also guess that median net wealth has probably deteriorated as well.  The bursting of the bubble in real estate has left 11 million Americans underwater in their mortgages.  So no wealth there to tap into in retirement, something that has been increasingly important in an era in which traditional pensions continue to vanish.

And speaking of pensions, many Americans who are fortunate enough to have pensions coming to them at retirement have seen the level of their retirement benefits get cut or have been required to work later in life to collect the same benefits.  This is a direct result of the stock market debacle that went on throughout the aughts.  

As for the huge chunk of us who only have 401ks with which to retire, the last twelve years have been no kinder.  I know personally that it took me over four years to get back to where my account had been in 2007 -- and being back to even so to speak when you are four years older is not exactly the recipe for successfully saving for retirement.  I also know that at its low point in 2011, the S&P 500 stock index was actually lower than it had been on January 1, 1999, a nearly unprecedented stagnation in the markets.

I tend to think that measured in terms of either income or wealth the average American is not better off today than he was in 1999, which is a pretty stunning indictment of the economic policies pursued during the Bush years.  (Obama has essentially spent three years trying to dig us out of the hole that Bush & Co. created.)

(Still working on the comment problem -- still deeply frustrated.  I will never understand blogs that don't have comments sections.  I feel completely cut off by this turn of events.  Keep your fingers crossed.)

 

Comments

[Sir Charles]

Comments are back.

[oddjob]

YEAH!

[nancy]

I've been harassing Typepad on the Twitter all day and they tweeted back that they'd be right on it!

Hey, couldn't have hurt. :-)

[Paula B]

Hooray! Thanks, Nancy, for being a pest! You did the right thing!

[Sir Charles]

I appreciate your efforts.

So glad to be back in dialogue mode.

[Joe S]

I think Prup may have gone into withdrawal over the past three days.

In other snark, I think Matt's considering shaving his beard (but not his mustache) and applying for Tom Friedman's job at the New York Times (Mustache of Understanding, Jr.). I'm about ready to read from Yglesias: "I was speaking to a cabbie in Helsinki the other day . . ."

[Sir Charles]

Joe,

Stanley and I pop into a gas station up the block from where I live several nights a week to get dog treats and shoot the shit with the night clerk, a really nice guy. I'm considering starting to put words in his mouth as a regular feature of the blog -- maybe I'll make the big time.

Of course, he differs from the Mustache of Understanding's wise hacks in that he actual exists.

Matt really does seem to be suffering from Slate-itis some days.

[beckya57]

I've quit reading Matt, a blogger that I started reading back when he was still at Harvard, and read religiously for years. His Slate-itis, as SC puts it, has gotten way too thick for me.

Glad comments are back.

[big bad wolf]

my guess is that ygelisas is regretting taking the moneybox job. i am not the reflexive anti-slate person that i understand that i should be, but i do dislike slate's blog format. whether it is moneybox or XX the entries are too short and too anchored to the topic of the particular blog (compare, for example, what amanda writes at XX when she is there with what she writes at pandagon. well, really there is no comparison, though she does better with the short format than many)itthe determin a. i, apparently by fiat. yglesias has really suffered from the format. he has to try to be on topic. when he is good, he is good because his mind wanders and makes connections---not always good ones, but at least interesting ones. moneybox is crimping him.

i agree with SC and LTC as to how matt is wrong about the country being richer. matt remains wrong, but i think an explanation for his error is that he was born in 81 and views the very idea of 1973 with horror. 1973---no internet, let alone hand held internet. many of us had small black and white televisions. there was no hulu or tivo or on-demand. only kids rode bikes, and without helmets. reading material was on paper. and paper meant that one sometimes had to wait hours (not so 42 seconds ago) to hear the news. the horror. i was there and it actually wasn't so bad, but i can see how matt would think we were a third world country. we are now, even those who make less than our counterparts in 73, richer in stimuli because gadgets that make us "rich" if we are gates or dead jobs or that chip guy. good stuff, but for us older folks and the folks made poorer we might take more money and less stimuli.

[Sir Charles]

Hi becky,

So happy to be connected again.

bbw,

Nice analysis I think. I am not a total Slate hater -- I used to like reading Tim Noah when he was there, I remain a Dahlia Lithwick fan (I know), and I like Dave Weigel's coverage of the right.

It seems to me that these moves by bloggers to different sites can be a bit perilous. I know that Ezra has hit the big time and he does good work at the Post, but I think his blogging -- from a pure pleasure of reading view -- has diminished in quality. And I think Yglesias, who was always sort of wonderfully all over the place, is now getting narrowcast into economics, an area where he is less than overwhelming. I thought him far more charming as a generalist.

The slower more egalitarian economy of the post-war era is to be missed. I am very appreciative of the positive trends that have been made in other areas of the culture, but the loss of economic security and power in the working and middle classes has been a real negative. As has been the rise of putatively economic thinking.

[beckya57]

Sir C, I like Lithwick and Noah too, but Slate in general makes me nuts--they really love the whole contrarianism thing. Liberals need to be making liberal arguments; the right wing is very effective at attacking us and doesn't need any help, thankyouverymuch. (I'm not advocating groupthink here, just that attacking liberal ideas just to be clever is really annoying.)

I agree with you about Ezra. He's continued to do very good work, but isn't nearly as much fun to read as he used to be.

Another, related loss from the post-war era was the absence of a hugely wealthy class that could essentially buy political power. Obviously we did have wealthy people whose wealth gave them outsized political influence back then, but nothing like the extremes we have now. The existence of a small group that is enormously wealthier than everyone else just isn't compatible with democracy.

[Joe S]

For Ezra Klein, I find it hard to read Washington Post blogs- there are just too many pop ups and it freezes my computer for five minutes.

I don't know why yglesias left Think Progress. He left a cush job at the Atlantic because of the need for contrarian bullshit. Now he goes to Slate ? I get the feeling he's moved right in the past few years.

[KN]

Three cheers for retrieving the comments.

On the common welfare issue I don't think there is any question about it, the overwhelming majority of people today are worse off than they were in 1999. According to records I have seen the price of oil was as low as $25 a barrel back then. Today it is 4 times higher. That has a direct impact on everyone who has to travel to earn a living, whether a few miles, or to fly all over the country. It also has a direct impact on every other commodity we use. Statistics I have seen cite that for the lowest four quintiles of the population (the 80%) income has either stagnated (best case) or declined (worst case) and I am not entirely sure that those stats adjusted for inflation. Add to that massive mortgage and appraisal fraud, not to mention securities fraud (AAA MBSs) and the shakeout from when it became inconcealable and I think it is pretty obvious that most of us are worse off than we were 12 or 13 years ago.

Some of us - those foreclosed upon for example are a lot worse off than they were only 4 years ago. Mea culpa, I haven't read the referenced article but on its face the claim that things are hunky dorie is palpably false.

[Sir Charles]

becky,

I stopped reading Slate for a good long while because of how much it aggravated me -- especially when Hitchens was cheerleading the Iraq war, Saletan was doing his abortion hand-wringing thing, John Dickerson was sucking up to Republicans everywhere, Mickey Lucas was bashing unions, and Jack Schafer was doing whatever the hell it is that he does.

One of the big losses in American politics in the post-1968 era was the need for Democrats to increasingly seek corporate backing and money as the erosion of organized labor occurred and the loss of white working class support became more of a problem. As a result you ended up with a party that feels the need to be very cozy with financial interests, which undermines the progressive project pretty profoundly. (No man can resist the lure of alliteration.)

Joe,

Part of my relative lack of enthusiasm for Ezra's blog is my dislike of the aesthetics of the blog. Actually, the American Propsect blog may be the worst in this regard. I used to read it daily and now I only look at it a couple of times a week because I just hate its layout so much. It's odd that these things matter so much.

I think Yglesias has moved a little bit to the right as well, but it may be that the focus strictly on economics just emphasizes that aspect of his sensibility.

KN,

I suspect that in places like Brazil, China, India, and some of the more stable parts of Africa, living standards have increased for a sizable number of people.

But certainly in the U.S. the massive loss of wealth caused by the fallout in the real estate and stock markets and the continued downward pressure on wages, coupled with huge unemployment and underemployment, make things considerably worse than they were in 1999.

[Crissa]

Alas, I think technology has let us actually be richer. Sure, I go out to dinner less often... But I have the internet in the palm of my hand for the price of one of those fancy dinners.

So on average, yes, we're richer. But only because technology has been able to keep us up with the slide. Everything from celphones to computerize textile manufacturing has meant that just a teeny bit of anything goes farther than it did ten years ago.

But I think that doesn't make it better. It means we're walking on a thinner and thinner tightrope strung above collapse, and Republicans are busily sawing on the safety nets that have kept us up for the last eighty years.

[Crissa]

I don't know why yglesias left Think Progress. He left a cush job at the Atlantic because of the need for contrarian bullshit. Now he goes to Slate ? I get the feeling he's moved right in the past few years.

He went to a job that paid more, had more hits and listeners, and no he's not been more contrarian. Look at who they have at Atlantic - he most certainly didn't leave there to move right!

TP has gone seriously downhill the last year. They're down to a few Facebook comments - can't even comment with Yahoo anymore, despite the pages saying you can - and while their articles are well-timed, they're shorter and less researched.

[oddjob]

@ Crissa | March 02, 2012 at 04:22 PM

I think that's really well put! I've thought about this before, but never systematically enough to figure out why I never quite felt comfortable about assertions that we were more or less well off than we used to be. Thanks for shining a light on what I hadn't yet figured out!