Is Flatter Freer?
posted by Frank Pasquale
Bill Henderson’s excellent posts on the bimodal distribution of lawyer salaries have sparked a lot of commentary in the blogosphere. But the stratification of lawyers’ salaries shouldn’t be surprising–inequality pervades the economy. As Robert Frank and Philip Cook observed in The Winner Take All Society (in 1995), professionals like lawyers, doctors, and dentists need clients–and those most adept at serving the interests of the 1% or so in control of over 40% of the nation’s financial wealth are going to prosper. The bimodal distribution of dentist incomes was observed even by the mid-1990s.
How does rising inequality affect career choices? I found this excerpt from Daniel Brooks’s book The Trap pretty compelling:
In 1970, when starting teachers in New York City made just $2,000 less than starting Wall Street lawyers, people who wanted to teach taught. Today, when starting teachers make $100,000 less than starting corporate lawyers and have been priced out of the region’s homeownership market, the considerations are very different. It may be counterintuitive, but talented young people actually have less control over their lives in a society in which they can get rich quick because, in such a society, the consequences of not getting rich quick become much more serious. When a middle-class income no longer buys a middle-class life, things that rarely or never make one rich become harder and harder to pursue. When it comes to the distribution of wealth, you’re freer when it’s flatter.
The mainstream media don’t like to talk about such counterintuitive ideas. But Brooks’s observations ring true with many. In today’s society, your class can determine whether your kids end up in a decent school, whether you have health insurance, even whether you can maintain friendships:
If, as Samuel Butler said, friendships are like money, easier made than kept, economic differences can add yet another obstacle to maintaining them. More friends and acquaintances are now finding themselves at different points on the financial spectrum, scholars and sociologists say. . . . As people with various-sized bank accounts brush up against each other, there is ample cause for social awkwardness, which can strain relationships, sometimes to a breaking point. Many find themselves wrestling with complicated feelings about money and self-worth and improvising coping strategies.
Brooks thinks those coping strategies are hard to come by; he asserts that in a “nation of self-financed higher education, tenuous health-care coverage, and out-of-control housing costs, Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ has hardened into an invisible fist.” Provocative thoughts. I guess there might be some objective harms from inequality.
October 2, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Posted in: Law and Inequality
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Responses (8)
C - October 2, 2007 at 9:38 pm
Compelling? Is that inclusive? Because I’m pretty sure that “a middle-class income no longer buys a middle-class life” is a claim completely devoid of content.
Frank - October 2, 2007 at 9:43 pm
C:
Do you think everyone with incomes below, say, $70K per year can get health insurance? especially if they work for a small employer who doesn’t offer coverage, have to seek it on the individual insurance market, and have a preexisting condition?
Is the evidence offered in this post devoid of content?:
http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2007/07/objective_harms.html
C - October 2, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Why make the (probably silly, and at least wildly question-begging) claim that the middle class can’t afford middle class life, when what you actually mean is that the middle class can’t afford some things that you think they should have?
And yes, by the by, I think that post is completely lacking in content relevant to my comment.
Frank - October 2, 2007 at 11:15 pm
So I guess you win the prize for nominalist of the day, C. Congratulations.
Nominalist C - October 2, 2007 at 11:54 pm
There’s something to be said for expressing yourself clearly, particularly when you’re embedding normative notions into what otherwise wants to pass itself off as a concerned-but-empirical little paragraph.
As one of those statistical freaks who preferred public interest to corporate law (opportunity cost ~ 100k), I like to know what’s being said about me. And when one is trying to claim that, because I’m making less than 70k per annum in a metropolis, I can’t afford a middle-class lifestyle, I like to let them know their concern is misplaced.
Vagueness and abstractions dissuade feedback or discourse. Which is, of course, your prerogative. But it’s not exactly frivolous trolling to point out a nonstandard usage that imports a whole set of normative premises.
Paul Horwitz - October 3, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Frank: What amount of “talk[ing] about such counterintuitive ideas” would convince you that you’ve overstated what the “mainstream media” don’t like to talk about, or at least that you’ve painted with too broad a brush? A quick-and-dirty Nexis search in the major newspapers database finds over 1300 uses of the phrase “income inequality” in the last three years. It only finds about 27 uses of “vanishing middle class,” but then that’s a fairly specific phrase. I grant that I haven’t added in TV, which I barely consider journalism but which is the primary source of information for many people, but isn’t that kind of issue pretty common Lou Dobbs territory?
As a friendly aside, whatever value is provided by the work done by Project Censored is, in my view, substantially offset by its misleading and meretricious name.
Frank - October 3, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Paul, point taken regarding the lack of a baseline. Who knows how much coverage of inequality is appropriate? On one worldview it is simply evidence of a just market system rewarding the diligent (or those with a natural right to the fruits of their parents’ diligence); on another it is a deeply troubling indication that some people are not getting a “fair share” or are being denied basic opportunities.
But I’m glad you brought up Lou Dobbs, because I’m really astonished you’d lump in Brook’s advocacy with his. Dobbs seems eager to pit America’s middle class against immigrants. Brook appears to me (on what is, I admit, a quick read of a book excerpt) to be suggesting that disadvantaged people globally have to start resisting economic arrangements that leave so many people without basic access to health care or stable incomes. Dobbs tries to rile up lower middle class Americans to “stop immigrants from taking over ER’s and schools;” Brook is arguing that the extraordinary tax cuts of the past 6 years could help fund public services and infrastructure that would make Dobbs-style panic over their scarcity much less compelling.
Just as not all Progressives in the late 19th century were represented by Pitchfork Ben Tillman, not all people who care about inequality today find their concerns expressed in people like Dobbs.
Paul Horwitz - October 4, 2007 at 8:52 am
Frank, I certain agreely that not all people who care about inequality find their concerns expressed in people like Dobbs. I wasn’t suggesting his views are similar to those of others whose critiques of income inequality you might find more persuasive or complete; only that even (or perhaps especially) some of the, in my view, least savory aspects of the mainstream broadcast media have not completely neglected the issue, even if one might not care for their approach. Cheers, Paul
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