Ah, yes, getting into the weeds of income, wealth, and tax incidence. Do you count unrealized capital gains as wealth, or is that gundecking the value of your properties, which is a fraud for certain values of New York real estate developers? If house prices have appreciated, must you consider the imputed income you could get for renting your house out as part of calculating your mortgage interest deduction? (Remember when the Clinton administration floated an idea like that? If laughing gas existed, Rush Limbaugh would have floated into the troposphere.)
Now consider what happens when the equivalent of four United States populations worth of people in Brazil, India, China, and the former Warsaw Pact achieve middle class standards of living. That’s a lot of disposable income that can go, fifty cents or a buck at a time, to social media subscriptions, home delivery of books and tools, streaming services, and live concerts. Ships and real estate forty years ago? Boring, although real estate would be even more boring if you weren’t adding to the population of newly rich people bidding up that prime real estate!
It is much ado, and once you get to the root causes, there’s nothing exciting going on.
Stephen: You’re absolutely right that this matter can be skewed like mad in any direction one chooses to get a wide array of outcomes. OTOH I think there IS something going on — see studies like this one.
Yes, Washington Monthly of the late 1990s Mickey Kaus, expanding the set of outcomes and directions to seek skewage. The Amazon reviews are instructive in that vein. If the discussion includes restoration of bourgeois norms and less obsession with credentials (I would have credited the Monthly of that era with really doing something about it if more interns came from Creighton or Marquette) as topics of some salience among public intellectuals and the like that’s probably a good thing.
February 28th, 2024 at 11:39AM
Ah, yes, getting into the weeds of income, wealth, and tax incidence. Do you count unrealized capital gains as wealth, or is that gundecking the value of your properties, which is a fraud for certain values of New York real estate developers? If house prices have appreciated, must you consider the imputed income you could get for renting your house out as part of calculating your mortgage interest deduction? (Remember when the Clinton administration floated an idea like that? If laughing gas existed, Rush Limbaugh would have floated into the troposphere.)
Now consider what happens when the equivalent of four United States populations worth of people in Brazil, India, China, and the former Warsaw Pact achieve middle class standards of living. That’s a lot of disposable income that can go, fifty cents or a buck at a time, to social media subscriptions, home delivery of books and tools, streaming services, and live concerts. Ships and real estate forty years ago? Boring, although real estate would be even more boring if you weren’t adding to the population of newly rich people bidding up that prime real estate!
It is much ado, and once you get to the root causes, there’s nothing exciting going on.
February 28th, 2024 at 11:46AM
Stephen: You’re absolutely right that this matter can be skewed like mad in any direction one chooses to get a wide array of outcomes. OTOH I think there IS something going on — see studies like this one.
February 29th, 2024 at 11:19AM
Yes, Washington Monthly of the late 1990s Mickey Kaus, expanding the set of outcomes and directions to seek skewage. The Amazon reviews are instructive in that vein. If the discussion includes restoration of bourgeois norms and less obsession with credentials (I would have credited the Monthly of that era with really doing something about it if more interns came from Creighton or Marquette) as topics of some salience among public intellectuals and the like that’s probably a good thing.