The Average 12-Year-Old is Taller Than the Average 6-Year-Old: The Post Gets Desperate in Making the Case Against an Inequality Problem

The Washington Post has consistently used both its news and opinion pages to try to convince readers that the main threat to their well-being and that of their children came from older people getting fat Social Security checks and generous Medicare benefits. This position has become harder to maintain, both because the economic collapse has made these benefits more important than ever to middle and lower income families and also because the fact that rich are making off with the bulk of the benefits of economic growth is becoming increasingly apparent. Still, the Post labors on.

Today, the paper featured a column by political consultant Bill Knapp arguing that we should all be happy because the economy has created jobs over the last 40 years and also because people at most points along the income distribution have seen some gains in income.

This is known as "the 12-year-olds are taller than 6-year-olds" argument in reference to the claim that poor nutrition might be stunting growth. The Bill Knapps of the world would get out their yardstick and measure a representative sample of 12-year-olds and do the same for 6-year-olds. After careful analysis of the data they would find that the 12-year-olds are taller. They would then write up their findings and get a column in the Washington Post telling readers that bad nutrition is not affecting growth.

Let's skip the idiocy. Economies grow, they add jobs, and people get on average richer. This happens everywhere barring war, natural catastrophe, or incredible economic mismanagement. The issue is the rate at which they grow and that people see improvements in their living standards. And for most people in the United States, the improvements in living standards over the last three decades have been very modest. The reason is that most of the gains have gone to the richest one percent.

Remarkably, Knapp can't even get his numbers right on how rich the one percent are. He tells us that:

" When you adjust for family size, the top 1 percent made, on average, $335,779 a year."

Actually, that is a cutoff for entering the 1 percent, not the average for the group. (Math is hard.) The average income for families in the top 1 percent is over $1.3 million.

After flunking the arithmetic portion of the column, Knapp then turns to the Nigerian cell phone user argument. Knapp thinks that the average Nigerian in 2012 enjoys a higher standard of living than did the average American in 1990, because Nigerians in 2012 have a higher rate of cell phone usage.

Okay, he didn't make this argument directly about Nigeria and the United States, but he did make this sort of argument about the "telling facts about our economic growth and future," which amounted to a rundown on the numbers for the use of cell phones, computers, and broadband. Knapp didn't even try to put these numbers in comparative terms, for example seeing how we measure up against Europe and Japan (not especially well).

So there you have it. Don't worry about how much money Robert Rubin and Angelo Mozilo made off the housing bubble and the difficulty that you are having finding a job, paying for your health care or your kids' education. Just be thankful that you have an iPhone.

Suck It Up Loser Liberals, Low-rated comment [Show]

YOU DO A GOOD JOB
written by Luke Lea, January 16, 2012 10:33 AM

Chinese water torture. Keep it up.

Thatisso
written by jumpinjezebel, January 16, 2012 10:36 AM

I look forward to a good laugh in the AM from the misinformed faux viewer.

...
written by freebird, January 16, 2012 11:02 AM

It seems to me that on a global basis inequality has been shrinking--
http://www.economist.com/node/21541113
not that anyone cares about what happens outside our borders.
I wonder whether international trade may be having a greater effect on US middle class income than what the likes of Rubin and Mozilo pull in?

...
written by Richard H. Serlin, January 16, 2012 8:28 PM

But Dean was there really even any gain at all for most over the least generation? All FAMILY quintiles had some gain, but was this just because of more work hours, with two spouses now commonly working?

A typical family a generation ago might have had 40 work hours (just the husband at a typical job). Today it may be 100+ (both the husband and wife each working 50, or more).

This is so important and everyone misses it!!

Families today are making only moderately more, but they have no stay-at-home spouse to make life much easier and less stressed, to save a great deal of money on day-care, eating out, cleaning, and work expenses like transportation. Plus, workforce hours worked per person have increased. And, healthcare and education costs are much higher.

Can somebody please calculate the change in non-healthcare-and-education consumption per hour worked, 1970 on? Or at least talk about this? I mean to only make modestly more, but the total work hours of the family go from 40 per week to 100, and a much smaller percentage of income is left over to consume after medical and education. Is this really even a gain at all over a generation, or an actual big loss a whole generation later for most families?

...
written by kharris, January 17, 2012 8:49 AM

After adjusting for family size??? Well, if that's just a way of saying "per capita" and if the average upper 1% family has 3.9 members, then your math and the WP's math are the same. Why on earth would one adjust for family size in a calculation like that? "My toddler doesn't work, but her share of family income is upwards of $300k per year!"

Wait a minute
written by reason, January 17, 2012 9:24 AM

Freebird,
that chart does in fact not show the global distribution of income. The fact that some individuals in India, China, Brazil and Russia have seen large increased in their income, doesn't mean that global income has become more equal.

...
written by Reweed, January 17, 2012 1:11 PM

A typical family a generation ago might have had 40 work hours (just the husband at a typical job). Today it may be 100+ (both the husband and wife each working 50, or more).

In the typical (white, middle-class) family a generation ago, the husband generally worked 40 hours a week in a paid job, and the wife generally worked 50+ hours in unpaid childcare and house maintenance. Today a substantial portion of that unpaid work (particularly childcare) is now paid to specialist providers. Whether this is a benefit or not is hard to say, but lets not exclude women's unpaid labor from the calculation.

...
written by Noni Mausa, January 17, 2012 1:31 PM

I like reading some Victorian novels (love George MacDonald) and Christie-era mysteries. The glimpses of how their economy looked can be fascinating.

In one George McD story, the father in the household was the only one who had income external to the household. As I recall he was "something in the city," so a bank manager or elevated office worker of some sort, the sort of job that today would qualify as the lower margins of middle-class. His unassisted income was sufficient to own a home, support his wife and child and four or five servants, plus maintaining a stable, a couple of horses and one larger and one smaller carriage. Sort of a two-car family, if you like. He wasn't unusual either.

Fast forward 60-70 years to the postwar boom in the USA. Again, a single breadwinner (let's call him "Dad") with a similarly paid job maintained a house, a car, a wife and five kids and his widowed mother, a small acreage like a private family park, and a lake cabin.

This looks to me as though the Victorian household and my father's household were comparable in the amount of full time labour (40-50 hours a week) it required to support 7 people and a comfortable household.

Today's families are smaller, averaging three to four people, and require two adults working for wages, to maintain same the sort of household. This tells me that the cost of a middle class household has gone from 1 worker per 7 dependents, to 1 worker per dependent since the late 60s, or about 7 times as expensive.

That's pretty durned fast for that size of cultural change.

...
written by Pliny, January 18, 2012 9:12 AM

The last paragraph is literally what Matt Yglesias believes.

The Average 12-Year-Old is Taller Than the Average 6-Year-Old: The Post Gets Desperate in Making the Case Against an Inequality Problem

About Beat the Press