But that was not a “per household” stat (which would be the mean); it was median income. Fifty percent of households have a higher income, fifty percent a lower one. Much better measure IMO.
But in some ways this is true. If you were a medieval king with Type I diabetes, your gold would begin to seem about as helpful to you as it was to Midas. You’d trade it all in in a second to get access to a 21st century Rx for insulin, right?
And what makes this perspective more valid, I think, is that there are still pretty large numbers of people in the developing world (though a diminishing percentage to be sure) who are just destitute. They don’t have enough to eat, or just barely have enough. They don’t have running water, modern sanitation, electricity, etc., and so don’t have smart phones or even cell phones. Their children don’t go to school, or go only until age eight or ten. They farm using inefficient methods, maybe even pulling a plow themselves if they can’t afford beasts of burden much less a tractor.
So compared to those people, the “poor” people in, for instance, the American South have really accelerated into a much more privileged position. Whereas just a couple generations ago, there were plenty of Southerners who were pretty close to that level of what we now think of as “Third World” poverty. Johnny Cash grew up in a family in Arkansas that sounds dirt poor, until you hear about how much worse his sharecropping neighbours had it.
John Henry Faulk told a story on NPR in the 1970s that has now become a yearly fixture on the network, that gave a similar view of Southern poverty at Christmastime that existed only decades ago.
Now this is an interesting point. Although the house call wouldn’t be of much help if you were suffering from a malady that day’s technology could not cure but which nowadays it could.
Still, another example I’d give is how older homes and schools have all this incredible, detailed wood and tile work that you would almost never see in a new home built today. It would just be too expensive, except for the very rich, to pay people for all that detailed work. But that in itself is a sign of a more prosperous society, where people’s skilled handiwork cannot be had for a song.
No it is not–that is my exact point. I can’t find quotes directly from Douglas Coupland’s highly zeitgeisty 1991 novel, but I did find this article, from the European Wall Street Journal, discussing it:
My initial complaint was about generational myopia, a lack of historical perspective. Yet this writer is aware of the deja vu of it all, and *still *makes the (IMO) error of saying “well, okay: it was premature in 1991, but *this *time it is really true about this generation of youth”. Bollocks, I say.
There was a story I heard on NPR just recently that made a very similar point. I was only half listening at first, so I’m not sure who they quoted, but it was someone from a bygone era. This author observed, to illustrate how poverty is relative, something like “no man would go out in public without a linen shirt”. Yet not too many years before that, linen shirts were available only to the very rich. By that day and age, to be unable to afford one would mark someone as very wretched indeed, even if they were able to buy other clothing that kept them warm and modestly covered, and had plenty of food and shelter.
*As a side note, this is a mischaracterisation of Generation X, that I think is being made by the WSJ writer rather than originating with Coupland. In general, GenXers were indeed the “baby bust”, the smallest generation of modern times, but they were by and large not the children of the boomers but of the “Silents”. It is the Millennials, originally called “echo boomers”, who are boomers’ offspring, and they are as a result a very large generation themselves. (Boomers, just due to their sheer numbers, would have had to be the most amazingly unfertile generation imaginable to give birth to a “baby bust” generation, and that is not how it went down.) The author should have referred to boomers as GenXers’ “predecessors” rather than “parents” there.
ETA:
That is clear from the graph. But my comparison point was 1996, 18 years ago and considered a strong economic situation at the time.
American English has no equivalent. We Yanks need a word that is tougher than 'nonsense", but not as rude as “bullshit”.)
Where did you get that I was saying it was not a stat? I was only saying that it should not be characterized as “per household” because that implies mean rather than median. Both are, of course, “stats”; but if the rich get richer while everyone else stays the same, the mean income will misleadingly rise while the median will not.
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