The New York Times has an elaborate article (by Dionne Searcey and Robert Gebeloff) cum interactive display (by Alicia Parlapiano1, Bob, and Shan Carter), all four of whom, it seems, are stunned to learn that the last six years have been pretty terrible in economic terms. The article is titled “Middle Class Shrinks Further as More Fall Out Instead of Climbing Up,” while the interactive graph goes by “The Shrinking American Middle Class.”
If you actually read the article (closely) and look at the graphs, you’ll notice that the percentage of American households with an income under $35,000 (in current dollars) fell from 40% in 1967 to 31% in 2000, before pushing back up to 35% in 2011 and then down to 34% in 2013. One can suspect that it’s slid another percentage point, or even two, as of today. At the same time, the percentage of households with an income exceeding $100,000 a year rose from 7% in 1967 to a high of 25% in 2000 before sliding to 22% in 2013.2 So, yeah, the Great Contraction, aka “The Twenty-First Century Blues,” was (and is) an economic disaster that is “not so bad” only in comparison to the Great Depression, which was far, far worse. But, in very large part, the “shrinking” of the middle class (from 53% in 1967 to 43% in 2013) has been good news rather than bad.
But that, unsurprisingly, isn’t good enough (or newsy enough) for the New York Times. The data the Times shows us show that, since 1969, the middle class has been shrinking because people have been moving up and out of the middle class even faster than formerly low-income people have been moving up and into it, which in fact is very good news. This long-term trend was pushed into reverse by the Great Contraction but is now being reversed again (back to “normal”) as we slowly (too slowly) regain our economic health. Despite the Times’ fervent efforts, what we see is not a “social upheaval.” In the long run, the middle class has been shrinking because people are getting richer, not because they have been getting poorer.
Afterwords
To their credit, nowhere (that I can see) do the authors talk about the demise of the “American Dream.”
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My knowledge of Italian is limited to the librettos of Lorenzo da Ponte, but this certainly sounds like “speak softly.” Alicia must hate meeting opera buffs. ↩︎
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“Never before,” the Times informs us breathlessly, “since the Census Bureau’s data on household income began, in 1967 — has there been a decline in the share of households that qualify as high income.” Why am I not surprised? ↩︎
