RALEIGH – Are the vast number of Americans doing better or worse than they were a few years or a few decades ago? I’ve commented on this and related questions often and recently, responding to the tendency for some left-leaning analysts to use questionable statistics and apocalyptic rhetoric to assert a lack of economic progress.
One response is to ask Americans themselves whether they believe they are better off than their parents, and whether they expect their children to do better still. I looked at the available survey data while writing a chapter of my recent book on advertising and commercial culture. They allow little ambiguity. Overwhelming majorities express optimism and satisfaction about their economic status and prospects. A 2003 Gallup survey also found that 55 percent of Americans described themselves as “very happy” and another 40 percent as “fairly happy” — the highest levels of happiness that Gallup had ever recorded. In a different survey by Harris, 57 percent said they were “very satisfied” with the ways things were going in their households. By comparison, only 21 percent of Europeans — mostly living under social-democracy regimes that American leftists envy — said they were “very satisfied.”
Perhaps certain confused, coddled academics would argue that this is simply evidence of false consciousness. And perhaps, one day, they will alight on Planet Earth and take a look around.
Another response to the proposition that economic mobility is atrophying is to look, as the Christian Science Monitor did a couple of weeks ago, at household access to the finer things in life. Over the generations, Americans have experienced truly amazing improvements in their daily lives. In the 1950s, for example, the average house was, by today’s standards, cramped and primitive. Few had modern conveniences. Today, only a small percentage of dwellings lack air conditioners, color televisions, and washing machines.
And just since 1992, the Monitor reported, the share of households containing stereos rose to 73 percent from 57 percent. VCRs are as commonplace now as color TVs at 87 percent, up from 68 percent. And only 19 percent had computers in 1992, compared with nearly 60 percent in 2002.
Of course, there remain families with uncertain prospects, uneven work experience, inadequate incomes, and unsustainable debt loads. There are missed opportunities, crushing disappointments, tragic mistakes, and agonizing failures. We need to improve educational opportunities for low-income youths and adults. We need to promote job creation in distressed communities, through devices such as lifting costly taxes and regulations that squash entrepreneurship.
But we also need perspective. Among those with incomes below the poverty line, 92 percent say they have enough food, 86 percent say they have no unmet medical needs, and 87 percent say they have no unpaid rent or mortgage. That’s not possible in the oppressive, depressing society of the popular leftist imagination.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.