This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… "Affordability" Isn’t Really What You Think:Real Gains, Nominal Prices, Broken Promises, & Disparate Senses of Just Entitlement…
Real Gains, Nominal Prices, Broken Promises, & Disparate Senses of Just Entitlement…The middle class moved; the male one‑earner family ideal stayed put—and turned highly punitive to rightwing males who bought into it as a sense of their social identity. That is a piece of the “affordability” meme- and vibe-cloud, but only a piece. And it is by no means the whole or even more than half of the piece, even though that is where Matt Bruenig wants to wind up. Matt Bruenig gnaws on the “affordability” question, and i think has smart things to say, but that he has hold of only one piece of a very large elephant—an ear, perhaps:
In 1963 spouse’s (and other family members’ incomes gave a 20% boost above the male level for median earnings. By 2024 those incomes gave an 85% boost. Thus—and i think this is Matt Bruenig’s main point—in 1963 median prime-age full-time male earnings bought you a participation ticket to an American Middle-Class TradLife, with a stay-at-home spouse and roughly median family income. Now it does not buy you such a participation ticket. If you are a right-wing male you thus see yourself as being forced to accept one of two forms of status dérogeance:
And the “but we can afford more stuff!”—2.5 times as much stuff, according to standard statistical measures (and as a follower of Nordhaus I believe that standard statistical measures are a substantial understatement and that it is fact much more)—does not make up for either fork of the status derogeance, no matter which one you choose. All this is, I think, fine and smart and right on the part of Matt Bruenig. But it is incomplete: it covers only the right-wing TradLife slice of the
What is going on with all the rest, with the non-rightwing non-TradLife aspirational reciters of the mantra “housing, childcare, college, medical costs”? And why is the requirement among the rightwing male TradLife aspirational that you accept the status dérogeance so painful? I mean: not only is she a fox, and not only does female peer pressure focus here on effective and successful household management, but she also brings in a lot of money as well. It is surprisingly close to what the 1960s would have been, but with the overwhelming majority of women bringing a dowry worth 15 years of your income to the marriage as well. What, really, is not to like? This is a complicate knot here. Let me try to cover a piece of it on the next three Thursdays, focusing on: (1) rightwing TradLife aspirational males, (2) distribution lower-tail males, and then (3) the “housing, childcare, college, medical costs” mantra.
But let me telegraph a good deal of what my conclusion from the whole series will be by noting that I wrote about this a week and a half ago <>, concurring with Paul Krugmana and Matthew Yglesias that most of the discontent and the discourse around #affordability is—after you get away from the rightwing male TradLife-aspirational nutters—simply levels of nominal (not so much real) prices that seem out of line, and a breaking of the contract society and the government made with you when it granted you your level of nominal income, particularly in “housing, childcare, college, medical costs”, but not exclusively or even primarily there. References:
If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…#affordability |
| ||||||||||
No comments:
Post a Comment