July 6, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:Oh, the good old days
Louis Uichetelle has a story comparing Tom Rath from Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a 1950's novel about climbing the corporate ladder, with the fate of a middle class couple today Tom Rath, Uichetelle concludes, had continually rising expectations, unlike the modern couple.
Now, as it happens, I'm very fond of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyes mid-century fiction. But there's a big difference between Tom Rath and the modern couple, which is that Mr Rath is in his early thirties, and the modern couple is in their early fifties. In both the 1950s and today, thirty-year-olds have higher expectations of future earnings increases than fifty-year-olds. The difference in life-stages is large enough to make the rest of the comparison meaningless.
If Mr Uichetelle read the novel, he can't have read it very closely. Not only does the age gap elude him, but he says:
But Tom, like most Americans in the first three decades after World War II, took a rising standard of living for granted. When he needed more income to make ends meet, he simply landed a better-paying job. Indeed, at parties throughout suburbia, Mr. Wilson wrote, "the public celebration of increases in salary was common." And Tom didn't fret about medical bills, job security or the quality of public schools for his three children.
Tom doesn't take "a rising standard of living for granted"--the book opens with his despair over the crackerbox house that he can't afford to move out of. He didn't just "simply land a better job"--he gets it fortuitously, through a personal connection. And half the book consists of Tom "worrying about job security"--he is constantly afraid that he is going to be fired from his cushy new job, and won't be able to get his old one back. A good portion of the other half consists of him worrying about his children's inadequate schools. This passage reflects Mr Uichetelle's (highly idealised) idea of what work like in the fifties--not how that work was described in the book. I don't know where Mr Uichetelle got his Cliff's Notes, but he should ask for a refund.
Update Actually, maybe I do know where he got his Cliff's Notes--he watched the movie instead of reading the book. Didn't Mr Uichetelle learn in high school that no good can come of this?
Posted by Jane Galt at July 6, 2005 6:48 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksThe fact that one of the families is fictional may have an impact on the comparison as well.
Even in the movie there's a good bit of worrying over money and kids.
A "kitchen sink" analysis of America's shortcomings. Those short, fat, sick, stupid Americans.
Even the good news is bad news. "9 out of 10 surveyed say they are "satisfied" with their standard of living." 90%! Seems like a fairly positive stat. But wait, these dummies don't compare their current standard of living with the past - "so they don't know they are falling behind on some treadmill of life".
You aren't satisfied, you just "think" you are.
And, not to nitpick, but isn't this (the Times piece) a very poorly written article?
"While the glass may be half full in the eyes of many beholders"...?!
And the stuff at the end about height?
"Average height has been stuck at less than 6 feet for a decade or more while Europeans have grown past that mark"
Really? The average European is over 6 foot tall? All in the last decade? Sources please, on this remarkable statistic. France - Land of Giants!
Just awful.
Perhaps someone might want to write an article on the decline of the quality of American journalism, and then have this guy "pushed into early retirement".
It sounds, Paul, like Uchitelle is (at the very least) looking only at the height statistics for normal people, and ignoring those weird short mutated people with the broad hips and the strange chest growths.
One can read the opening to the novel at Amazon.com, and see that Megan is correct. The Raths are embarrassed by their house because they can't make repairs themselves, nor have the money to pay someone to do them. The reviews of the book stress the horrible nature of the corporate rat race--Tom ends up taking a lower paying job to escape '20 hour days'.
The NY Times obituary of Sloan Wilson describes the Raths as:
'Married for 12 years, with time taken away by war and now with three small children, they fret in a tacky house in Westport, Conn., driven by contrary social aspirations and not enough money to enjoy any of it. The house needs repair, the children schooling, and the car is wheezing.'
Paul Z
Wide hips, chest growths? My kind of mutant.
Anyway, you are onto something I think. I knew when reading the "6 foot tall" nonsense that the author was probably referring to the interesting spike in average height in Holland/Norway/Denmark over the last 20 yrs or so.(5'10+ avg ht for men, 5'7 for women-pretty tall, pretty small sample)
Socialized medicine from birth has helped no doubt. And, poster children for "where America went wrong" brochure. Contrast that with the "infant mortality" numbers from the article. Tall blond men and women vs. minority crack babies.
The places I have been in Europe, Spain, Italy, Ireland, seem to have more of us subhuman dwarves, well under the 6 foot mark.
also, there's the issue of the %ge of foreign born. bringing in large #s of immigrants from less develeopped country tends to decrease your average height.
this is kind of like the infant mortality rates, where the us is penalised for a great healthcare system that sees more infants get aggressive treatment that is unsuccessful, rather than simply being stillbirths in decrepit european hospitals.
As for infant mortality, I've got three thriving grandchildren who were born at 26 to 28 weeks. I suspect that in many European countries, they wouldn't have been counted as live births.
Our numbers are also affected by immigration from places with inferior health care and diets, who therefore are shorter, less healthy, shorter lived, and more likely to have unhealthy babies. But Europe also has a lot of immigration from similar countries; do they not count guestworkers in their health statistics?
Finally, I'm old enough to remember the 1950's. My grandfather was a successful small businessman, so his household should be reasonably representative of the middle class, if not upper-middle (aside from having a divorced daughter and her kid - me - living with them before divorce became common.) The family ate out once a week, in not too fancy of places; grandpa probably ate lunch out nearly everyday, but unless it was with a client he'd go to a cheap cafeteria. They had one car (a nice, well-maintained, late model client-impressing Buick which was less reliable than the cheapest new car on the lot today). No TV or air-conditioning until sometime in the 1960's. Refrigerator, range, washing machine, and a clothesline in the backyard. (Grandma might have had a clothes dryer but prefered the airing-out clothes get hanging on the line when weather allowed.) I presume they had health insurance (because grandpa sold insurance of all kinds), although I have no idea how much it cost or how much it would cover, but even Medicaid will now pay for many treatments that hadn't been discovered back then.
Of course, they never went short on food or had trouble paying the utility bills or the mortgage (if it wasn't paid off already). Other than that, they would appear "poorer" than my neighbors living on welfare are now.
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