[e]ntry to the top 1 percent now comes with $347,421, which I’d simply call comfortably off.Given that this works out to 38k or so a month, this may well be the single dumbest thing ever published in the NYRB. According to this website Illinois has the highest starting teacher salary and it is 37,500. His notion of "comfortably off" exposes his blindness to what actually existing work-class American's confront.
The difficulty in having an effective conversations about inequality and how to fix it, isn't just
A couple years ago I was taking a qualitative research class and the professor was always talking about what it was like to be one of the lower income parents at his child's school, he was a tenured professor and his wife was psychologist, I am sure they were well into the six figure income area, but he saw himself as a low income individual. The kicker with him is that he did all sorts of research with low income people, I have always wondered if he really understood what it is like to be poor, or if he just saw it in terms of having low status might hurt people's feeling. My sense is that he sort of missed the whole not knowing where your next meal is coming from thing that goes with being really poor, or the monthly fear of being homeless, in his case his fear was that his children might look down on him if he didn't buy them a nice car one day. I guess the rich are just different.
ReplyDeleteYeah, obviously the tendency is to look up and not down but when writing about privilege surely the author or an editor ought to have caught the monstrous stupidity of the sentence and sentiment. People who hundreds of thousands of dollars a year do that for years and years and either they spend like drunken sailors or they're as wealthy as Romney.
ReplyDeleteGood point about always looking up, I guess one good thing about taking survival jobs over breaks is that I get to see how the other half lives, over Christmas I worked as a security guard at the x games, many of my co workers were definitely pretty close to the edge both emotionally and financially. Definitely makes you appreciate what you have
ReplyDeleteOdd isn't it? Most of us know some of us for whom the knife's edge between being in a crappy situation and living on the street is an everyday reality while the louts and boobs who make or pass judgement on policies have stick figure poors in mind. It's like having a keen sense of unreality is a prerequisite for high society.
ReplyDeleteSometimes I think it only takes a short time of living in a secure employment situation to forget that some people live paycheck to paycheck, or in my case one summer bike sale to bike sale
ReplyDeleteI think it's more a case of willed forgetting for those who have it slightly better off and a clear case of not caring for the riches when it comes to thinking about the poors.
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