When the publisher of Banker & Tradesman walks through the newsroom, he occasionally reaches into his pocket for the keys to his Ferrari – and a penny from that same pocket often falls to the floor. He doesn’t even bother reaching for it, but the entire news staff dives for the coin, in a pathetic effort to double their pay for that day.
But journalists are sophisticated capitalists. We don’t begrudge the wealthy their wealth. As long as the social service safety net is in place (free barrels of rum on our desks; gently used paper towels in the bathroom), we are content to work hard in the hope that some day, we, too, will live the life of a publisher.
The income inequality cha-cha is all the rage these days, although the moral of the story remains a bit murky. Are we interested in dragging the rich folks down to our level? (“No more imported beer for you, sir. Drink Bud like the rest of us.”) Or, shall great riches be lavished on all, be it butcher, baker, or column maker?
The closest America might have come to a middling level of income equality was in the medium-sized factory/mill towns, where sufficient numbers of folks all worked in the same union-scale pay grades so that “equality” was achieved. If that was Heaven at some point, today the remnants are a sorry mess, suggesting that equality needs some fine-tuning – or the magic of the market, which, again, tends to breed inequality.
The Metropolitan Area Planning Council cranked out a tear-inducing inequality analysis in December, noting that in the Boston region, the disparity between rich and poor has grown faster in the past three decades than the interest on a publisher’s bond portfolio.
While trying mightily to sound detached and academic, the council couldn’t resist just a bit of a sermon. “Wealth in the region has become increasingly concentrated, creating a smaller group of wealthy families than ever before, while more Greater Bostonians than ever struggle to make ends meet.”
To be sure, as a matter of undergraduate sociology, the numbers are a bit sad. But in the perspective of Metro Boston, it may well be cause to pop open the champagne and smoke cigars – as plutocrats tend to do.
A Definition Of Success
What keeps the Greater Boston economic development boys and girls working hard isn’t the need to find a few new textile mills or shoe factories to employ the Great Unwashed.
No, success is marked by adding to the Boston-Cambridge biomedical, high-tech colossus, which encourages highly educated, well-paid science and computer and finance dorks to move to the area, marry each other, send their kids to snobby schools, and, of course, cure cancer.
For decades now, nationwide, but especially in a city such as Boston, “prosperity” and “inequality” are not unified in the way that they once were. Employment rates? Median income? A region can be economically healthy in the aggregate, whether these kinds of numbers are going up or down.
For those folks haunted by the notion of inequality, or, at the least, the idea that the poor will always be with us, there is academic research to ease the pain.
As Bob Rector at the Heritage Foundation think tank (and others, too) have been explaining for decades, if you graduate from high school, then get married, then get a job, and then have a baby, your chances of drifting below the poverty line are shockingly small. You may not be in that magical top 1 percent, but you’re doing better than almost any other “poor” people on Earth.
As cranky academics have pointed out, much of the government aid in the form of health care and day care and various income transfer schemes don’t count in the official numbers, comparing “income” between the middle class and the poor folks – who may not be as impoverished as we believe.
Strumming guitars and “camping out” may bring “inequality” to our attention. But the level of sophistication we need to make sense of it all is more complex than that.
