Liberal pundit discovers left economics
Michael Green's posts on poverty rebrands old left critiques as wonky new insights.
To get a sense of My Life is a Lie — the essay on poverty by Michael Green that liberal media and pundits have been buzzing over for the past week — all you have to read is a single passage a few paragraphs in:
I’m sure many of my left-leaning readers will say, “This is obvious, we have been talking about it for YEARS!” Yes, many of you have; but you were using language of emotion (“Pay a living wage!”) rather than showing the math.
On one hand, leftists will undoubtedly agree with most of what Green has to say here. On the other hand, however, there is a thread of basic ignorance that runs throughout the entire piece: Green is by his own admission completely unfamiliar with left work in economics, and seems to have only encountered the various activist and campaign slogans that have emerged from it. The result is that Green is mostly just reinventing the wheel — but perversely, these efforts to distance left analysis from left politics are almost certainly why his essay has been so warmly received.
In brief: Green argues that our measures of poverty and fair wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living and that benefit cliffs are a barrier to upward mobility. That’s it. And it’s a pretty good summary of that argument, as far as summaries go; particular points of left orthodoxy are often made piecemeal, and we would do well to spend more time aggregating them for a popular audience.
But consider, for example, Green’s point that “we have created benefit cliffs and income phase-outs that systematically capture the working poor”. The biggest expense trapping families, he argues, is childcare. Green writes:
To reach the median household income of $80,000, most families require two earners. But the moment you add the second earner to chase that income, you trigger the childcare expense…If one parent stays home, the income drops to $40,000 or $50,000—well below what’s needed to survive.
Sure. But now read this post by Matt Bruenig on childcare back in 2021:
The idea that a one-child family with two parents each making $45,000 per year should pay the full unsubsidized cost of child care, which is what the program looks like in year one, seems preposterous…In practice of course, two-earner families with incomes just above these cliffs will often have one of the earners drop out of the labor force so that they can qualify for child care subsidies.
This is a slightly different scenario but the logic is identical. In both cases childcare expenses are eating up so much income that there is a massive financial gulf (what Green calls “the valley of death”) barring entry into the middle class, and the more tenable solution seems to be for one parent to simply stay home even though that will keep the family trapped in precarity. The main difference here as far as I can tell is that Bruenig is way into the mathematical weeds of this argument, whereas Green just drops a few well-known figures.
Or consider the section of Green’s piece subtitled “The Hedonic Lie: Why a Phone Costs $200, Not $58”. The pivotal claim of this passage is here:
To function today—to factor authenticate your bank account, to answer work emails, to check your child’s school portal (which is now digital-only)—you need a smartphone plan and home broadband.
This is not even a quantitative argument! In fact, this is a significantly less substantive argument than leftists and liberals have been making for years; for example, all the way back in 2012 you can find Nancy Scola defending so-called “Obamaphones” as a necessary intervention for the poor. And if her numbers aren’t sophisticated enough for you, you can look at studies like this one on smart phones help homeless veterans manage their healthcare. These are the kind of statistics that left activists point to on a regular basis.
Again: it is not often that one encounters writing that aggregates Matt Bruenig’s work on benefit cliffs and Nancy Scola’s points about Obamaphones into a broad narrative about class in poverty and America. But pretending that leftists have not been doing the intellectual work of substantiating their ideas about poverty is just ignorant; it is the kind of take you are likely to have if you are, say, a liberal finance guy who only encounters left politics in the soapbox slogans of Bernie Sanders campaigns.
If a simple failure to give credit to where credit is due were Green’s greatest crime this post probably wouldn’t be worth writing; but I think the author’s unfamiliarity with left economics has more serious consequences than that. In his follow-up post, Green argues that
We are witnessing a phase transition in American society: The shift from Class to Caste. Class is defined by income. It is fluid. Caste is defined by credentials and access. It is sticky.
Anyone who has paid attention to left media discourse on class over the last decade should quickly recognize this as another iteration of a recurring debate: is class defined by economic factors? Or is it defined by “cultural” factors like education and identity? Here’s where Green’s analysis gets sloppy. What kind of credentials get you into the middle “caste”?
The Insta photo from Meadow Lane grocery in NYC. The Wharton degree. The Birkin bag…the club sports, tutoring, test prep, afterschool activities, parentally-sponsored charitable activities to pad the resume, the global travel to build perspective, the brand clothing to signal affiliation, the therapist to address smartphone and social media-induced mental health issues…
A family earning $150,000 can afford “survival”. They cannot afford to buy their children a seat at the table.
So in other words, caste is still defined economically, because you have to be wealthy enough to participate in all of the rituals and purchase all of the credentials that gain you admission into the “middle caste”. I do not think this is the kind of mistake Green would make if he had been paying any amount of attention to left discourse around class, because whenever someone tries to argue for the cultural formation of class, the standard materialist move is to point out that that culture was in turn formed by economic factors.
There are of course more serious problems with his analysis. In particular, Green is talking about entry into the middle class as a gateway to economic stability when it is anything but; this is particularly true given his attention to intergenerational wealth.
Integenerationally speaking, most families in the top 40% of earners are downwardly mobile. It is of course only near the very top of the income distribution that downward intergenerational mobility becomes implausible again, mostly because at that point you are earning enough income from capital alone to reach the top quintile.
I am not saying much new here, but that’s the point. Green has rediscovered all kinds of left insights into affordability and such, but he still has his work ahead of him if he wants to develop this into a plausible and coherent theory of class. Or, of course, he can just read what leftists have already written.
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