An Economic Lesson For Returning Students

The Boston Globe for September 8, 1999, carried this dismal information: if all the households in the United States are divided into five equal fractions, and the household incomes in each fifth averaged together, the economic classes of the country look like this compared to one another: the bottom fifth earns $8,800 a year, the second fifth $20,000 a year, the third fifth $31,400 a year, and the fourth fifth $45,100 a year. The balance of the fruits of our managed society have been reserved for the upper 20 percent of its households, and even there the lion’s share drops on the plate of a relatively small fraction of the fat cats. If this is the structure our centrally controlled corporate economy has imposed after a century in close partnership with science, government, religion, and schools, it argues loudly that trusting any large employer not to be indifferent, or even hostile, to American social tradition and dreams is misplaced trust. Of course, it’s always a good idea to treat such data with caution because marshaling numbers to prove anything is remarkably easy to do (indeed, teaching a reverence for numbers may be the most significant blindness of modern times). And yet my own intuition tells me that profound social insecurity is the direct legacy of our economic management and its quantitative values.