Posted on 01/07/2016 7:10:36 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Raffi Melkonian asks -- as relayed by my colleague Tyler Cowen -- "When can median income consumers afford the very best?"
Tyler offers a list of some of the items in the modern, market-oriented world that are as high-quality as such items get and yet are easily affordable to ordinary people. This list includes iPhones, books, and rutabagas. Indeed, this list includes nearly all foods for use in preparing home snacks and meals. I doubt very much that Bill Gates and Larry Ellison munch at home on foods -- such as carrots, blueberries, peanuts, and scrambled eggs -- that an ordinary American cannot easily afford to enjoy at home.
This list includes also non-prescription pain relievers, most other first-aid medicines and devices such as Band-Aids, and personal-hygiene products such as toothpaste, dental floss, and toilet paper. (I once saw a billionaire take two Bayer aspirin -- the identical pain reliever that I use.) This list includes also gasoline and diesel. Probably also contact lenses.
A slightly different list can be drawn up in response to this question: When can median-income consumers afford products that, while not as high-quality as those versions that are bought by the super-rich, are nevertheless virtually indistinguishable -- because they are quite close in quality -- to the naked eye from those versions bought by the super-rich?
On this list would be most clothing. For example, an ordinary American man can today afford a suit that, while it's neither tailor-made nor of a fabric as fine as are suits that I suspect are worn by most billionaires, is nevertheless close enough in fit and fabric quality to be indistinguishable by the naked eye from expensive suits worn by billionaires. (I suspect that the same is true for women's clothing, but I'm less expert on that topic.)
Ditto for shoes, underwear, haircuts, corrective eye-wear, collars for dogs and cats, pet food, household bath towels and "linens," tableware and cutlery, automobile tires, hand tools, most household furniture, and wristwatches.
(You'd have to get physically very close to someone wearing a Patek Philippe -- and you'd have to know what a Patek Philippe is -- in order to determine that that person's wristwatch is one that you, an ordinary American, can't afford. And you could stare at that Patek Philippe for months without detecting any superiority that it might have over your quartz-powered Timex at keeping time.)
Coffee. Tea. Beer. Wine. (There is available today a large selection of very good wines at affordable prices. These wines almost never rise to the quality of Chateau Petrus, d'yquem, or the best Montrachets, but the differences are often quite small and barely distinguishable save by true connoisseurs.)
Indeed, the more one ponders this question relayed by Tyler, the more one suspects that the shorter list would be one drawn up in response to this question: When can high-income consumers afford what median-income consumers cannot?
Such a list, of course, would be far from empty. It would include private air travel, beachfront homes, regular vacations in Tahiti and Davos, private suites at sports arenas, luxury automobiles, rooms at the Ritz, original Picassos and Warhols. (It would, by the way, include also invitations to White House dinners and private lunches with rent-creating senators, governors, and mayors.)
But I'll bet that this latter list would be shorter than one made up in response to the question relayed by Tyler combined with one drawn up in response to the question that I pose above in the third paragraph (call this list "the combined list").
And whether shorter or not, what other germane characteristics might distinguish the items on this last list from the combined list?
A version of this post first appeared at Cafe Hayek.
Donald Boudreaux is asenior fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a Mercatus Center Board Member, a professor of economics and former economics-department chair at George Mason University and, a former FEE president.
Life is finite, for everyone. At least for now, money doesn’t change that.
On another note, I remember visiting a royal medieval Castle in England, seeing the throne room, and thinking how much worse the kings had it back then than the life the average person lives today.
You can either go for freedom or go for equality. You can’t go for both. Government-forced “equality” is of course the antithesis of freedom. Freedom denies government meddling in our lives and in the results of our efforts (using “equality” as an excuse for coercion and increased power) and freedom couldn’t care less about “equal” results. Freedom itself makes life worth living.
Nevertheless, as Milton Friedman said, “a society that puts equity first will have neither equality nor freedom. A society that puts freedom first will have a great deal of both.”
If you are rich, you can probably get good health care..
For consumer items save cars this is pretty true. There are however major differentials in quality between the homes of the rich and the rest of us, and that’s where a person spends most of their lives.
The answer to the question is Obamacare...
Being wealthy in America means having the means to avoid diversity.
The answer to the question is Obamacare...
Individual economic benefit is derived from participation in the voluntary cooperation of the free-market economy. That was America through the 1800’s and that freedom (not “equality”) is why she became the most prosperous and powerful nation on earth.
Her decline has been precipitated by increase in the size and power of government using “equality” as an excuse.
Economic mobility in a free market economy is well known. The history of freedom of opportunity in capitalism shows a steady upward economic move of people from lower to middle to upper class. The average American in the 1800’s was better off than the average citizen in any other country.
Just remember, government creates poverty, the free market creates wealth. The free market economic isn’t perfect, but is is way ahead of whatever’s in second place.
I have to agree. I have everything I need, more than what I want, and money in savings. I mean... I still have a student loan that I’m chipping away at, and I don’t travel much anymore because boarding my two cats would get expensive and flying is a misery unless you go first class. But other than that, I’m doing fine. It helps, of course, that there’s very little I want and I enjoy hunting for bargains at Goodwill. But I don’t see that as a feature of my oppression or anything.
In a modern advanced division of labor society, one does not have to be a capitalist and own the means of production in order to get their benefit. One has only to be able to buy the products. In a division of labor society one gets the benefit of means of production owned by others every time one appears in the market as a customer.
Puts me in mind of the statement that was made about a decade ago: When you factor in all the advances in medicine, everything made out of plastic, everything that runs on electricity or gasoline, and jet airliners that Queen Victoria (1820-1901) did not have, an American secretary has it better than Victoria did.By the way, the same comparison would hold between an American secretary now and a slaveowner in the antebellum South.
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