Class Warfare and the Hard-Working Wealthy
With the election and economic doom-and-gloom everywhere, the last few weeks has seen a particularly virulent strain of Democratic class warfare. The premise has been that the rich are idle, their money grows on trees, and the rest of us are victims of their parasitic success. But for a lesson on how the rich get rich, check out Dalton Conley's piece in the New York Times this morning.
As Conley, a sociologist from New York University, writes:
Since 1980, the number of men in the bottom fifth of the income ladder who work long hours (over 49 hours per week) has dropped by half, according to a study by economists Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lorenzo. But among the top fifth of earners, long weeks have increased by 80 percent.
Conley further states that the real "income inequality" in the United States isn't between rich and poor but between the middle and the top. That is, since 1980, relative wage gaps between economic classes in the lower half have remained stable. But in the top half, some are making more money and others are making even more.
The result of this high and rising inequality is what I call an "economic red shift." Like the shift in the light spectrum caused by the galaxies rushing away, those Americans who are in the top half of the income distribution experience a sensation that, while they may be pulling away from the bottom half, they are also being left further and further behind by those just above them.
The result of this paragraph is what I call the "sociology duh effect." Like English majors padding term papers with big words to cover the fact they haven't read the book, many sociologists feel a need to render the obvious into the confused. So galaxies aside, let's bring it down to Earth: At least half of American males want to be the Richest Man on Earth—and they're willing to work harder to achieve it.
This is hardly surprising, and despite writing for the op-ed page, Conley doesn't appear to have an opinion as to what this might mean. But I'll supply one:
Hard work and financial earnings are positively linked. Americans earning over $100,000 per year do so by burning the midnight oil, and, according to the study cited by Conley, those who earn the most also work hardest. Progressive tax rates mean these folks already contribute a disparate share to the nation's coffers, but some policymakers—particularly Democratic and notably Barack Obama—say they should be taxed more because others aren't making as much.
That's about as big a disincentive to success as there could be, telling the hardest working among us to work even harder so he can pay for those who won't work hard.
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Reader Comments
Let's all use the same lingo here folks. "Rich" in modern-day politics doesn't mean "wet-T-shirt" rich or Paris Hilton rich. It means (2006 data) if you made more than $108.9K you are in the top 10%, if you made $64.7K you are in the top 25% and $32 K+ puts you in the top half of all tax payers!! "the Rich" indeed!!
The highest-earning 1% of Americans earn 22.06% of all income reported; the same 1.4 million taxpayers pay 39.89% of all federal individual income taxes
The lowest earning 50% of taxpayers ($32K/yr or less puts you in that bucket) reported 12.5% of all AGI but only paid 2.99% of total income taxes
The old adage "we spend too much time working to make any real money" reflects the state of the "working wealthy" in the US. If some of the dems have their way the old adage from the former-USSR will be brought back. That is, "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."
The notion that all rich people are rich because they work "harder" than everyone else is utter garbage. They may work "smarter" but usually not that much harder.
The guy who started "Girls Gone Wild" is mega-rich. He capitalized on a Machivellian form of smart. Pollute the country with excess nudity, take advantage of drunk girls to get it done, and get stupid men to pay for it. He does not somehow "deserve" to not have substantial amounts of his income reallocated (to tax) when, in fact, his income IS a reallocation upward of money from the silly and the poor to begin with. Don't give me that BS about the jobs he created and the important service he performed. You know better, let's hope.
Look around you. From sports to entertainment to real estate to insurance to wall street to unnecessary mediccal charges to tobacco to liquor to you name it, a lot of the GDP of America is the rich class fleecing the poor class to begin with. Class warfare if you tax it? Hardly. Somebody has to pay for the wars. Fail to tax? Then the poor pay again with inflation as you are seeing now.
who works hard
Your interpretation of the quotes you use and the studies misses something here. This economy produces some jobs with too many hours and other jobs with too few. Many of the poor can only get part-time minimum wage jobs and often cannot get second jobs due to constantly shifting work schedules in their first jobs. So some people want and need more work but cannot get it.
For the American middle class, ours has been a trend toward longer hours for less pay over the last 20 years. Perhaps you wouldn't accept information like that from a sociologist (like me) so I would refer you to Juliet B. Schor, an economist, whose research proves this shift. Most of us would like fewer hours but cannot afford to resist the pressure to work longer hours.
Many of us hope the longer hours will be seen by our bosses as showing loyalty which can be rewarded later on with promotions, etc. But the point here is that we work longer hours than we would want to. More importantly, no one offered us a choice. And, there is no guarantee that the sacrifice of longer hours will be rewarded at all. Longer work hours can mean doing more work and thus be equated with working harder, and many Americans are doing that without it creating any upward mobility for them at all.
But, long hours is not always the same as working hard nor the same as working harder. Research in white collar salaried office work shows that when workers know that overtime work is expected no actual or appreciable increase in labor may happen. Rather, we work slower or take more breaks to make up for the "free" time we are losing by working OT. Overtime cannot be equated, automatically, with working harder.
As the previous respondent suggested, the blog generalizes a lot about the labor market without indicating which segment of the labor market is assumed to be "working harder" in order to get ahea and, through that hard work, actually getting ahead. It certainly is not true, and unproven, for the mass of American workers.
Arguments that the wealthy get ahead because they work harder and therefore deserve to hang onto and enjoy more goodies than the poor (who, by extension, may be assumed to also deserve their own hardships) just aren't empirically proven and in fact are easily disproven. One example: somewhere out there is a mansion and beautiful estate with all the luxuries one could hope for...and who is this hard working person who owns it? The guy who invented Chia Pets. Of course it took more work to then invent a Chia Head.....
In fact, because Americans are finding that working harder has not provided them with upward mobility, more and more of them look for mobility through other means: Lotto, gambling, game shows.
The U.S, is not a meritocracy just because we wish it were true.
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