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Todays Poor Better Off Than Average American In 1971
As we continue to ratchet up what we consider to be "poverty" in this country, consider the following:In 1971 44.5% of Americans owned a clothes dryer. Today 61.2% of families living under the poverty line have one. 98.5% of impoverished families have a refrigerator compared to 83.3% of all Americans in 1971. 97.4% of people in poverty have a color TV compared to only 43.3% of Americans in 1971. Impoverished families have air conditioners today at more than twice the percentage that Americans in general had in 1971. In fact, the ownership of these items have been increasing consistently over the past several decades. The "average" American of 1971 might be considered "impoverished" by today's standards. According to research from Professor Steve Horwitz at Austrian Economists: The overall lesson is clear: lives for Americans below the poverty line continue to get better in terms of what they are able to put in their households and have to make use of everyday. And do note that the average American household in 2005 was doing much better than its 1971 counterpart. MUCH better - and this doesn't even count medical advances and the like. So whatever one hears about stagnating wages and the like, the bottom line is ultimately what we can afford to buy and have in our households to improve our lives. By those measures, life for the average American is better today than 35 years ago, life for poor Americans is much better than it was 35 years ago, and poor Americans today largely live better than the average American did 35 years ago. Hard to square with a narrative of economic stagnation or decline. It is interesting how our concept if poverty changes over time. When I was a child in school in a rural area of an East Coast state, many of my classmates in first grade didn't have a home phone. Several of them didn't have indoor toilets and most didn't have electric clothes dryers. Mind you, this was within 100 miles of Washington DC and not West of town in the hills, either. And those folks were "average" because they had electricity. The poor people back home at that time had none. They cooked with wood, heated with coal, used kerosene lanterns, pumped their water by hand and their Daddy would sometimes open the doors of the pickup and turn on the radio so people on the porch could listen. How our idea of "poverty" has changed! Posted by: crosspatch 2009-11-28 |
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