Part II
In his 2013 book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” author Thomas Piketty observes a curious phenomenon about prices: Throughout the 1800’s, novels reported the incomes of their main characters—servants and peasants, not so much—as a way of benchmarking their social positions. Incomes also showed something of family history for the gentry, because people who had money tended to have always had it. Even when prices had generally doubled, by the end of the century, the incomes of the gentry and owners in stories were reported, and readers could make reasonable estimations of what was what. On the whole, Piketty says, prices were stable.
Since World War II however, I would say only the incomes of the very rich—millionaires—is mentioned. Soon it appears only billionaires’ wealth will be worth mentioning. For the prices of meals in restaurants, or of cars or rents—nada. Prices have increased steadily over this period, and a number that benchmarked something, that might have meant something, loses its meaning after a number of years. In some more years, the comparison becomes ridiculous:
On seeing a news report of someone’s salary on the news, my father once exclaimed with the most passion I’ve ever seen in him, “Now what man is worth sixteen dollars an hour?” The person in question was the president of a huge manufacturer of steel.
The cost of things is fundamental to me in coming of age; it ranked and dimensioned things as I came to intuit how much of my life I had to trade to attain something—not only a car or a house, but training for a good job, a profession—for a place in society.
But with prices always changing, eventually everything once well-known seems to be wrong; the proportions of things warps. A general disorientation takes root and grows. “This remembrance of what things used to cost is a real millstone,” a friend writes me, “because you start wondering if it is worth going to a film or getting a pint in a pub any more. It’s not that we can’t afford it, but it is just that feeling that things are getting pricy beyond their value.”
Everybody experiences this. Everybody sooner or later is ambushed by some cost that seems too much, some necessary thing that now feels like it’s spiraled to the very fingertips of our reach. Some people may slip a cog in their memory and skip over the last price they paid, to a purchase farther back in time, so the difference becomes more pronounced.
And then the change in prices becomes a villain in our sight and we wish it would all recede. We wish for someone who can fix this—make things go back to the way they were.
But they won’t.
They can’t. When prices fall—not just the price of eggs or butter, but food and lumber and clothing, across the board—bad things are happening. Factories are closing, businesses are failing and people are being thrown out of work. They can’t afford things. Demand, as in “supply and demand,” falls, so prices drop a bit in an effort to goose selling. But it’s a downward spiral. It happened over and over, from the 1700s up to and including the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s. (By the way, before that the “Great Depression” referred to the period 1873-1879, as figured by American historians, or 1873-1896, by Europeans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression. Twenty-three years of economic depression. That’s a generation.)
Yet, however long or however often economic depressions occurred, people at the bottom of the heap were accused of prolonging their own woes. They were told that they should stir their lazy selves, tighten their belts, and not look for a handout. They were told that help, especially help from the government, would inflict damage on their moral character—it would be socialism, if not sinful.
There were always examples of people who raised themselves from poverty to wealth; President Herbert Hoover was one. By force of their own determination and grit, according to the doctrine of rugged individualism, such people overcame all obstacles.
In my view the grace of God played as much a part. The inspiring story of a pot of gold to the pure of heart is still alive, somehow. It’s a useful ideal to encourage people to sail their own boat—as though everybody had a boat. In considering the general population though that ideal always sounded in my ears like a professional basketball player telling us we should all be able to dunk, a weightlifter saying our failure to bench press 300 pounds is our own fault.
***
Back to rising prices—remember rising prices?
Rising prices are a feature, not a bug, of a government that believes it can and should do more than stand aside and let things work themselves out. Rising prices can be unsettling, and the longer we live the more unsettling they can be. But, over the last ninety years, that economic regimen has brought much better results than what went before.
Yet, the feeling of having left a better time remains.
People seemed to be friendlier. You could enjoy yourself a lot more for a lot less. There wasn’t all this crime and there wasn’t all this anger. Things lasted longer; things were sturdier; things were better made. Things were better in general—weren’t they? We should go back.
But to where and when?
to be continued
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