A Matter of Well-Being

What that means depends on who you're talking to

More than seven years ago, I met with a woman named Jan Lewis, who was then the president of Catholic Charities in a suburb of Kansas City, an area which had seen its poverty rate double during and after the Great Recession. She told me that one of the issues was that the low-wage service sector—think fast food and big box retail—were the only kinds of jobs she saw available to her clientele. "I've said all along that we need to tell the American consumer to stop demanding the lowest price always and stop demanding the highest return on their investment dollar," she told me. "If not, we are going to continue to see all these non-living-wage jobs."

I’ve thought about it regularly since. I was inclined to agree with her, but I’d never heard anyone name the systemic issue so clearly. It wasn’t just that too many workplaces were paying their workers too little. It was also that we, and really all of us, demanded the cheapest prices.

That is a growing issue today, as companies that treat their workers like interchangeable robots, like Uber and Amazon, keep delivering goods and services at lower and lower prices and with more and more convenience to consumers. It creates a central tension: being able to buy what we need as cheaply as possible increases our well-being, but so does earning as much as possible, and paying workers better will, to some degree, increase the cost of goods.

Two recent articles addressed this in different ways and from slightly different angles: this article in The Atlantic by Luke Savage tries to get at the tension by rather imperfectly mapping it onto the Prop 22 debate in California. (The measure exempts app-based gig-economy companies from rules that would require them to treat their contractors like employees.) Being the Jacobin writer that he is, he blames Democrats for this, both because President Bill Clinton acceded to some of the central tenets of Reaganism, and because the Democratic Party is now trying to bridge the interests of white-collar college graduates and labor. In another, Faiz Shakir, a former campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, argues that Democrats can win back more voters who didn’t go to college (really, at issue is white non-college-educated voters, since they were more likely to vote for Trump in 2016 and 2020, though slightly less so last year) by delivering the goods: policies that expand government and ease their financial burdens.

In the meantime, and from the other side of the country, I watched one particular post make the rounds through my social media networks. It was written by an MBA candidate who works in corporate finance. She sat in a coffee shop in Florida, she said, “I see people talking freely, working on their MacBooks, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it.” The motivating force of her essay was worry about the rise of socialism, which she believed was taking hold in her generation because they’d never been forced to live in abject poverty. “With the current political climate giving rise to the misguided idea of a socialist utopia, will we see the light? Or will we have to lose it all to realize that what we have now is true prosperity? Destroying the free market will undo what millions of people have died to achieve.”

I have three quick, important, and rather obvious points about why this piece was bad: first, plenty of young people in America today have lived in total, absolute poverty at some point in their lives; second, sitting in a coffee shop and counting the MacBooks you see is not a good measure of anything, and may have just been evidence she was among affluent people in an affluent place; and third, inequality is unfair and unstable because people are missing benefits they’ve earned because they’re accruing to someone else instead.

Regardless, this seemed to resonate with people, even those who do not go to coffee shops and can’t afford laptops. It makes the same category error Jan Lewis noticed, that being able to buy cheap consumer goods is a measure of well being. I’ve also seen people I know worry about the increase in prices a federal $15 hourly minimum wage may present, even if they would currently benefit from such an increase. (Arkansas’s is already $11-per-hour because of a referendum that passed in 2018.) Buying things cheaply has been a policy goal since at least the Reagan administration, one in which we can squeeze workers and producers as tightly as possible as long as prices go down at the register. It’s the economic reasoning that has driven many government policies for nearly my entire life. That’s why people who make $11 an hour are worried about a raise to $15, and why people who might be persuaded by a crusade against economic inequality worry instead that we don’t know how prosperous we really are. But there are plenty of instances in which a price increase to reflect the true cost of a good or service would benefit society far more than keeping prices down, and many important measures of well-being—better healthcare, more security, leisure and family time—that are missing from current calculations.

How people rate their economic well-being is often influenced by their ideology, and their ideology is often influenced by who is around them and what they think more than a careful consideration of facts and arguments. I’ve written before about how hostile many people in my hometown are to government services, even when they benefit from them, even during a pandemic. One of the things that haunts me most, though, is how eager they were for corporations to get bailouts during the first Covid-19 relief bill debate, working people who believed bailing out the stock market would keep them from being laid off, which one of them called “the trickle effect.” I think too many people underestimate the extent to which Reaganomics has permeated the atmosphere and set the tone, and while writers are correct that this needs to changes, it will take more time than one presidential administration has.

What I’m Listening To:

I will be glued to the Reply-All series about Bon Appetit until it’s finished.

What I’m Recommending:

Cook’s Illustrated remains my favorite source for finding a basic recipe for some classic dish I don’t know how to cook. I think this is truer in the winter than ever, because more often than not I want some carb-filled 1950s style casserole to eat when I’m cold and tired, and this is the best place to find them. I recommend tuna noodle casserole and shepherd’s pie, which I made with Impossible ground beef.

Cute Animal Picture of the Week:

Sampson is back to his old self after a brief taste of the wild.