The Distribution of the Wealthy

November 2, 2011

Posted by Jay Livingston

After reading David Brooks’s column in the Times yesterday, I was catching up on podcasts of KCRW’s “The Business.”  The installment from three weeks ago included a short clip from the “30 Rock” pilot:

DONAGHY:  Sure. I gotcha. New York, third wave feminist. College educated. Single and pretending to be happy about it. Over scheduled, under sexed. You buy any magazine that says ‘healthy body image’ on the cover. And... Every two years you take up knitting for... a week.

Like Jack Donaghy, David Brooks gets a lot of mileage out of cultural stereotypes. That’s because there’s some truth to them. Yesterday, the day after Halloween, he went back to the closet and pulled out his favorite costumes – two Blue, two Red.

The two costumes in each color reveal a basic inequality.  In the Blue

• the urban elites, concocting complex financial deals and buying expensive merch
• the unwealthy liberal liberal-arts majors in Zucotti Park.

In the Red

• the solid middle-class, unpretentious and hard-working
• dropouts struggling to find work and keep their families together – struggling but too often failing.

The Red inequality, says Brooks, is more important yet less noticed.

The Blue inequality is confined to “New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Houston and the District of Columbia.” The Red inequality is “everywhere else.”

These costumes are colorful; they capture our attention. But they can mask other realities.* As Brad de Long points out, the economic and social gulf between the educated and the uneducated – Brooks’s Red inequality – is just as wide, perhaps wider, in New York as in Fresno. Brad also unfairly goes to Forbes magazine and waves the page showing the geography of the very wealthiest. It looks like there’s a bit of Bluish inequality in the heartland too.

“I count 6 of the top 10 living in regions where Brooks claims people like them don't live,” Brad says. But three of those six are Waltons (John-boy didn’t make the list this year), and ten is hardly all of the top 1%.

Howard Wial at the Atlantic  uses IRS data to give a more complete picture. He uses $200,000 household income as his cutoff point – the top 3% rather than the 1%. But while the lives at the 99th percentile may be different from those only at th 97th, the maps are probably similar.

Here’s where the wealthy are.

The twenty MSAs shown in shades of green (nice choice) account for slightly more than half of all such households. Which means that nearly half of the top 3% live everywhere else. The New York area is home to 11.5% of the wealthy. But then, it’s home to more people of every income. So Wial looks at the ratio of wealthy to nonwealthy. A handful of rich folks can make a difference in a small population like Washoe County, NV and Natrona County, WY, which go from gray to green (who’s rich in Casper?). But in Phoenix, the population is so large that the although many wealthy people live there (2% of all wealthy people in the US), they are under-represented.

It’s not surprising that the Occupy movement started in New York, nor that it has spread to other places highlighted in these maps. But as Wial says, Occupy protests have also sprung up in “such seemingly unlikely locales as Anderson, Indiana, and Texarkana, Texas.”

If you’re looking for only red and blue, you’ll miss a lot of interesting purple shades, from magenta and mauve to puce and plum.


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* Brooks has done this before, notably in Bobos in Paradise. See Sasha Issenberg’s article http://www.phillymag.com/articles/booboos_in_paradise/ in PhillyMag for notes on Brooks’s blindness to inconvenient realities and his just plain making stuff up.

Start-ups and Safety Nets

October 30, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images.

Is socialized medicine the road to serfdom, a snare that will sap people of their independence?  Or is it liberating?

James Wimberly had a great post yesterday at The Reality Based Community (here), and I’m neither too proud nor too ethical to steal his data and summarize his idea.

George W. Bush did not really say, “The problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur.”  But that statement does fit with the American tendency to view our country as the land of entrepreneurship (literally “enterprise”).  America is, after all, the land of opportunity, where anyone can become rich.  And the way to get rich is to be an independent, risk-taking entrepreneur and start your own business.  That’s what we do here in the US, and we do it better than most.  At least that’s what we think.

But look at this chart showing the rate of start-ups per working-age population.

The US ranks 23rd.  That doesn’t quite square with all those photo-ops where the president (Obama, Bush, Clinton – they all do it) goes to some small successful company out in the heartland.  What is it about these other countries that makes for more risk-taking?

Wimberly has an answer: the safety net.  He makes the point with an analogy – his own photos of kids on a rope-walk – a single rope hung between two platforms in what looks like the Brazilian rain forest.  (It’s really just a replanted hillside, formerly the site of a favela). The kids have safety devices – hard hats, a safety harness, guide-ropes to hold on to.  Without these, only a few of the most f oolhardy would try a Philippe Petit walk.  But the safety devices allow lots of kids to take a risk they would otherwise avoid. 

The same logic applies to small business.

How many Americans are locked into jobs they hate by the fear of losing health benefits? No Dane ever has to worry about losing her right to medical care by quitting her job to go it alone

Safety devices cost money, but they pay off.  On the rope-walk, you can see the reward in the expression on the kids’ faces when they reach the other platform.  In the national data, you see it in the those start-ups.

The countries with significantly higher startup rates than the USA are those with stronger, more comprehensive, and more centralised social safety nets, along with correspondingly higher taxation.

See Wimberly’s entire post – with the photos, footnotes, and comments – for a fuller explanation.

The Use of Bad Words (Two F**king Links)

October 29, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m not a huge fan of curse words, though I know some people swear by them.  Repeat them, and they quickly lose whatever effect they might have had,* and then what do you use for emphasis or surprise.

There are exceptions, like Ian Frazier’s “Cursing Mommy” (here  for example).   And then there’s Colin Nissan’s recent essay  in McSweeny’s on decorative gourds for autumn.  I laughed out loud when I read it.  Then I went back and mentally removed the curse words, and it was just not funny.  Try it.

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* Sometimes draining the word of its impact is the goal of such repetition, as when David Bradley (you mean you haven’t read The Chaneysville Incident?) teaches Huckleberry Finn to high school students.

“One of the first things I do is I make everybody say it out loud about six or seven times,” Bradley said.
“The N-word?” Pitts [the “60 Minutes” inteviewer] asked.
“Yeah, ‘nigger.’ Get over it,” Bradley replied, laughing. “You know. Now let's talk about the book.”

Words and Pictures

October 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

Newspapers report facts – thing that actually happened.  They run photos of things that actually happened.  They don’t make stuff up.  But they do choose which facts to report, and they do choose which photos to run.    Usually the two are congruent. 

But not always.  Wonkette ran this photo of a page from the Washington Post. 

Wonkette and other sites have contrasted the photo with this video of a cop deliberately firing a tear gas canister at close range directly at a group of demonstrators who had come to aid of someone who had been hit in the head with a tear gas canister.

But what’s also noteworthy is the contrast between the photo (nice cop, nice kitty, nothing violent happening here) and the Post’s own lede:   “Police fired tear gas and beanbags. . . .”