4 For middle-class families, the losses from positional arms races have been made worse by rising inequality. As I will presently discuss, most of the income gains in the United States during the past several decades have gone to people at the top of the income distribution. Not surprisingly, their higher incomes have led these people to build larger houses. There is little evidence that middle-class families envy the good fortune of the wealthy. Yet through a chain of indirect effects I will describe, the larger houses at the top have led families in the middle to spend sharply higher fractions of their incomes on housing, in the process forcing them to curtail other important categories of spending.
Our task in the pages ahead will be to examine these propositions in greater detail. But before taking up the question of whether rising inequality harms the middle class, I will first examine the extent to which inequalities in income and wealth have, in fact, been rising.
CHAPTER TWO
Recent Changes in Income and Wealth Inequality
Presidential aspirants since Ronald Reagan have urged us to ask whether we’re better off now than we were four years ago. At any time from 1945 to the early 1970s, the answer for most Americans would have been a resounding yes. Throughout that period, incomes grew at about 3 percent a year for families up and down the income ladder.
Today, however, this question is more difficult to answer. During the past several decades, the distributions of income and wealth in the United States have changed in such a way that the economic environment for most upper-middle-class people has become much more like that of World A than of World B in our earlier thought experiment. For example, although the top 1 percent of earners now have more than three times as much purchasing power as in 1979, the real earnings of families in the middle have risen only slightly since then. The meager income growth that these families have experienced has come not from hourly wage increases, but rather from growth in the labor force participation of married women.
The conventional wisdom has long been that a growing gap between the rich and the middle class is a bad thing. But that view is now under challenge. Some revisionists, respected economists among them, argue that inequality doesn’t really matter so long as no one ends up with less in absolute terms. Using income levels to measure the well-being of individual families, these inequality optimists argue that since the rich now have much more money than before and the middle class doesn’t have less, society as a whole must be better off.
Yet “having more income” and “being better off” do not have exactly the same meaning. I will argue that changes in spending patterns prompted by recent changes in the distributions of income and wealth have imposed not only important psychological costs on middle-income families but also a variety of more tangible economic costs.
I begin with a brief look at the changes that have occurred in the distributions of income and wealth in the United States during the decades following World War II. Income growth from 1949 until the end of 1970s was well depicted by the famous picket-fence chart shown in figure 1. Incomes grew at about the same rate for all income classes during that period, a little less than 3 percent per year. It varied a bit across income classes, but no matter where you fell along the income scale, you enjoyed fairly robust income growth.
Since consumption expenditures tend to track incomes closely, spending was also increasing at a fairly uniform rate across the income scale during this period. The houses in which rich people lived in 1979 were bigger than those of their counterparts in 1949, but the same was also true, and by roughly the same proportion, of the houses in which poor and middle-income people lived. In short, income and consumption growth were balanced across income categories during the three decades following World War II.
Figure 1. Changes in before-tax household incomes, 1949–1979. Source: www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/f03.html.
That pattern began to change at some point during the 1970s. Some people date the change even earlier than that. In any event, if we look at the period from 1979 to 2003, we can see how dramatically different the later income growth pattern is from the earlier one. In the more recent period, shown in figure 2, people at the bottom of the income distribution gained only just over 3 percent in real purchasing power terms, and gains throughout the middle were also very small. For example, median family earnings were only 12.6 percent higher at the end of that twenty-four-year period than at the beginning. Income gains for families in the top quintile were substantially larger, and larger still for those in the top 5 percent. Yet even for these groups, income growth was not as great as during the earlier period. The later period was thus a time not only of slower growth but also, and more important, of much more uneven growth.
Figure 2. Changes in before-tax incomes, 1979–2003. Source: www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/h03ar.html.
Income inequality has also increased in two important ways not portrayed in figures 1 and 2. One is that changes in the income-tax structure during the presidency of Ronald Reagan significantly shifted real after-tax purchasing power in favor of those atop the socioeconomic ladder. Tax rates on top earners were increased slightly in the final year of the George H. W. Bush administration and further still during the administration of Bill Clinton, which also increased the earned income tax credit for working families with low incomes. But those interim adjustments were far outweighed by the large additional tax cuts targeted toward high-income families by George W. Bush. A second change not reflected in figures 1 and 2 is the magnitude of the earnings gains recorded by those at the very top.
Figure 3. Change in after-tax household income, 1979–2000. Source: Greenstein and Shapiro 2003.
Figure 3 portrays some of the results of these two additional effects. Note that the middle 20 percent of earners (net of both tax and transfer payments) gained slightly more ground than in figure 2, which showed pretax incomes (net of transfer payments). Note also that the gains accruing to the top 1 percent in figure 3 are almost three times as large as the corresponding pretax gains experienced by the top 5 percent in figure 2.
Even more spectacular income growth has occurred within the top 1 percent of earners. Only fragmentary data exist for people that high up in the income distribution, but there are snapshots here and there that show us what has been happening. One valuable source is the salaries of CEOs, which Business Week has been tracking for more than twenty years. In 1980, the CEOs of Fortune 200 companies earned about forty-two times as much as the average worker. That ratio had grown to more than five hundred times as much by 2000. And there is evidence that the gains have been even more pronounced for those who stand even higher than CEOs on the income ladder.