still time.
WORKING-CLASS SUFFERING MEETS REALITY TV
Before becoming prime minister of En gland, Benjamin Disraeli wanted to issue a wake-up call about the horrible state of the British working class. So, in 1845, he wrote24 a novel, Sybil, which warned of the danger of En gland disintegrating into “two nations between whom there is no sympathy . . . as if they were inhabitants of different planets.” The book became a sensation, and the outrage it provoked propelled fundamental social reforms.
In the nineteenth century, one of the most effective ways to convey the quiet desperation of the working class to a wide audience was via a realistic novel. In 2010, it’s through reality TV.
Now, I realize that most of what we are served up under that rubric is actually the farthest thing from reality. The exploits of Snooki, Jake the Bachelor, and all those Real House wives hardly reflect life as most of America knows it and lives it.
The real America is hurting—not jetting off to an exotic location for “fantasy suite” canoodling. But no matter how sobering the statistics we are getting on a regular basis (and I’ll offer up some bracing ones in a moment), the hardships and suffering tens of millions of Americans are experiencing are almost entirely absent from our popular culture. This is a shame, because drama and narrative have the ability to move people’s perceptions in a way that raw numbers never can.
Enter Undercover Boss, the CBS reality show in which corporate CEOs don disguises and spend a few days experiencing what it’s like to be a low-level worker at their companies. It’s the kind of popular entertainment that can start out as one thing—a fun, high-concept reality show—but morph into something that affects the zeitgeist by shining a spotlight on just how out of touch America’s corporate chiefs are. And their cluelessness is not just about the jobs their workers do—it’s about the lives their workers lead.
Ever since Roseanne went off the air, the stories of working-class Americans have been all but invisible on network TV. But now, week in and week out, millions can see what down-sizing and Wall Street’s demands for ever-greater productivity and earnings margins did to the lives of so many Americans, even before the economic crisis.
The chasm between America’s classes has reached Grand Canyon–esque proportions. Forty years ago, top executives25 at S&P 500 companies made an average of thirty times what their workers did—now they make three hundred times what their workers make. That’s the kind of statistic a show like Under-cover Boss can bring to life. Here are a few others:
• Between 2007 and 2008, more than26 800,000 additional American house holds found themselves trying to make do on under $25,000 a year, bringing the total to nearly 29 million.
• In 2005, house holds27 in the bottom 20 percent had an average income of $10,655, while the top 20 percent made $159,583—a disparity of 1,500 percent, the highest gap ever recorded.
• In 2007, the top 10 percent28 pocketed almost half of all the money earned in America—the highest percentage recorded since 1917 (including, as Business Insider editor Henry Blodget noted, in 1928, the peak of the stock market bubble in the “roaring 1920s”).
• Between 2000 and 2008, the poverty rate29 in the suburbs of the largest metro areas in the United States grew by 25 percent—making the suburbs home to the country’s biggest and most rapidly expanding segment of the poor.
Making matters even worse is the fact that while the classes are moving farther apart—with the middle class in real danger of disappearing entirely—mobility across the classes has declined. The American Dream is defined by the promise of economic and social mobility—but the American Reality proves just how elusive that dream has become. Indeed, Canada, Ger-many, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and even the often-reviled France have greater upward mobility than we do.
Here are the numbers:
• Almost one hundred million Americans30 are in families that make less in real income than their parents did at the same age.
• The percentage of Americans31 born to parents in the bottom fifth of income who will climb to the top fifth as adults is now only 7 percent.
• If you were born32 to wealthy parents but didn’t go to college, you’re more likely to be wealthy than if you did go to college but had poor parents.
In other words, as the middle class is squeezed and more and more people are being pushed down, it’s becoming harder than ever to move up. In a study of economic mobility33, Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution and John E. Morton of the Pew Charitable Trusts wrote, “The inherent promise of America is undermined if economic status is—or is seen as—merely a game of chance, with some having the good fortune to live in the best of times and some the bad luck to live in the worst of times. That is not the America heralded in lore and experienced in reality by millions of our predecessors.”
And yet it’s certainly the reality being experienced now, and, at least in part, the reality being shown on Undercover Boss. Now, I’m not suggesting that the show is going to foment a working-class rebellion or directly lead to a raft of social reforms. But it might lead to a conversation we, as a nation, desperately need to have—especially in Washington.
Maybe if our elected representatives went undercover for a little while and experienced the reality of millions of American families that are measurably worse off because of Washington’s actions and inactions, we might get some real change.
MIDDLE-CLASS JOBS AND “THAT GIANT SUCKING SOUND”
Since the recession began34 in late 2007, we’ve lost more than 8.4 million jobs. Over 2 million of those35 were manufacturing jobs, the kind of jobs that have traditionally delivered American families into the middle class—and kept them there. We lost 1.2 million36 manufacturing jobs in 2009 alone. And while job numbers go up and down, the loss of these blue-collar jobs has been going on for decades.
In 1950, manufacturing accounted37 for more than 30 percent of nonfarm employment. As of last year, it’s down to 10 percent. Indeed, one-third of all38 our manufacturing jobs have disappeared since 2000. This devastating downward trend has contributed greatly to the erosion of the middle class.
There have been a number of recessions over the past few decades, and our economy has rebounded after each one. But each time it has bounced back in a way that made it harder for those in the middle class to stay there—and even harder for those aspiring to become middle class to get there.
The way that the useful section of our economy is being replaced by the useless section of our economy is rarely talked about in Washington. But the numbers don’t lie: The share of our economy devoted to making things of value is shrinking, while the share devoted to valuing made-up things (credit-swap derivatives, anyone?) is expanding. It’s the financialization of our economy.
According to Thomas Philippon39, professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, the financial industry made up 2.5 percent of America’s GDP in 1947. By 1970, it had grown to 4 percent. By 2006, just before the