One passage jumped out at me in this News Hour interview of Neal Gabler conducted by Judy Woodruff. You may recall that when he posted his confessional piece at Atlantic I remarked on it. Here’s the passage:
There’s one statistic that I cite in the piece from a USA Today survey which I think is fascinating. And that survey determined that a middle-class existence in America would cost $130,000.
$130,000 a year is not the middle of anything. It’s more than two standard deviations greater than the median. If people genuinely think that everybody in the United States is going to earn upper middle incomes, there’s a serious problem of expectations.
It hasn’t always been this way. Go back and look at old clips from The Honeymooners or The Life of Riley. They weren’t poor. They were just average families. People have forgotten where the middle actually is.
Both series were about working class families with incomes and life styles well below middle class. Of course, working class people greatly outnumbred middle class people then.
To the Moon, Alice!
Those were people in the middle just as people in the middle today are working people. Thinking of living in the Hamptons and sending your kids to the most expensive schools in the country as “middle” is a problem.
I was thinking about this last night, as I caught a movie, “Take this Job and Shove It” (1981), and it just seems like assumptions about what is “normal” moved towards higher levels of income. I started watching the movie because I wondered if that was the actor from Airplane! (yes, it was), but found the plot, the working class p.o.v. of a the story from Wall Street (1987) interesting.
This seems like a topic that should have already been analyzed extensively, but the 1970s TV shows I remember were Laverne & Shirley, Welcome Back Kotter, Sanford and Son, All in the Family, Barney Miller, WKRP, and the Jeffersons. Other than that last one, it was pretty working class. It seems like there have been few similar points of view since then. (Two broke girls is halfway in the mold from what I’ve seen, but it’s also a bit Prince and the Pauper in its framework)
“Thinking of living in the Hamptons”
In fairness, not all houses in the Hamptons are palatial. He was on NPR the other night, and his house is really modest. In fact, it looks a lot like my wife’s parents’s house — a small cape. It’s a bit rundown in fact.