Barack Obama and Mitt Romney put the economy at the top of their campaign agendas. They have both focused primarily on labour - the high rate of unemployment. The attention is deserved, but other parts of the economy should not be ignored. There is the worrying decay of the nation’s capital stock - the physical, social and financial infrastructure. There is also something wrong in the consumption side of the economy, but there is a heated debate on just what the problem is.
Many commentators believe that the middle class, which makes up the bulk of the population, has a big problem: a decline in living standards. After all, the Census Bureau reports that the $50,054 median household pre-tax income in 2011 was 9 percent below the all-time peak, adjusted for inflation, reached 12 years earlier. That decline in income is so large that it must have led to some erosion in the typical family’s consumption.
Even if purchasing power really had declined by a few percent, the slide was from such a high starting place that loud complaints about deteriorating lifestyles would be unseemly. In fact, though, the median income measure distorts consumption reality. It omits services received without cost, for example healthcare provided by the government and insurers. It excludes the effects of changing taxes and shrinking household sizes. It underestimates the value of technological improvements - think mobile phones and the Internet - and of the vast expansion of new, now-cheaper housing during the bubble.
These adjustments are almost certainly large enough to offset the reported decline. So the middle class doesn’t need a lecture on the virtues of making do with less. The adjustments also explain the lack of massive political indignation, even if there is evidence of minor irritation, at declining incomes. The placidity is not a sign that the American middle class has found stoic fortitude in the face of adversity. Rather, it is a reasonable response to consumption which is not really falling.
On the left, the common view is that the rich, or more precisely the widening gap at the top of the income ladder, is the nation’s leading consumption problem. For the top 1 percent of earners, income - after taxes and government transfers and adjusted for inflation - has multiplied four-fold since 1980, while the median has not even doubled. The disparity might be reduced by statistical adjustments, but the trend is real. The rapid increases in pay for celebrities, top executives and financial professionals are typical.
President Obama sometimes criticises this increase in income inequality in favour of the rich. That may be politically astute, but it dodges the ethical question of whether, and why, this change is undesirable. For egalitarian purists, it is, on principle, but the gains of the wealthy do not necessarily imply that the less well-off have fewer economic opportunities. For those who worry that the country is becoming a plutocracy the increased concentration of wealth is clearly a step in the wrong direction, but the wealthy have always had a great deal of political power in the United States.
There are good reasons not to worry too much. The actual increase in consumption which comes with an increase from very great to awesome wealth adds almost nothing to an already high quality of life. Further, more people have joined what might be called the luxury class. In 2011, 4.2 percent of American households had a pre-tax income of more than $200,000. In 1968, the proportion above that threshold (in 2011 dollars) was a mere 0.7 percent.
Another increase in inequality - against the poor - receives much less attention. For four decades until 2000, poverty was waning; the proportion of households with an income under $15,000 dollars (at 2011 prices) fell steadily. In the new century, though, the trend has clearly reversed. That is a real problem, even though the typical consumption of America’s poorer families is high by global standards.
The median cash measure understates the poor families’ decline. They have also lost out on cost-free services. Compared to richer Americans, today’s poor receive worse health care, leave their free public schools earlier and have less effective police protection. It is also worrying that today’s poor are also socially needier than the poor of their parents’ generation; overall they are less able - or, as some Republicans would have it, less willing - to help themselves.
Only a major social commitment could address this problem, but fixing poverty is low on the agenda of both candidates. Their indifference is politically sound - the bottom of the economic heap will not win them the election - but morally regrettable. Complaints about the supposed income losses of the middle class sound self-serving. Whines about the gains of the rich are often tainted with envy. A serious commitment to the poor would show that generosity still thrives in the world’s richest country.