We’re living in a Golden Age of Television, Megan McArdle notes, but why is it so dark?, she wonders:
We watch so many crime dramas because there are no big stakes in middle-class American life. The criminal underworld is one place where decisions actually matter — and can be shown to matter, dramatically.
You look at novels of the 19th century and they are filled with terrible, dramatic dilemmas that actually did face ordinary people. People lost everything, and risked starvation; they performed terrible, cruel, dangerous work for years on end in order to make a little money; they died from the risks of their job or the ordinary diseases that used to carry off so many people in their prime. Women had to choose between love and the economic security of a well-off suitor. The result of a regrettable night of passion could be expulsion from polite society, or a hasty forced marriage. People in the 19th century, and into the middle of the 20th, faced a lot of dilemmas wherein doing the wrong things could permanently destroy their lives.
America has less drama because compared with the 19th century, our economic and social systems are basically risk free. Don’t get me wrong: Being poor is still really terrible. But almost no one who is poor in modern America (with the exception of a few drug addicts and mentally ill people) is seriously at risk of spending an extended period of time without heat, food, clothing or shelter. The ordinary poor do not starve to death, and they do not freeze to death. Those were real things that could happen to, say, a middle-class family without close relatives whose bread-earner died. They were real things that did happen to a lot of people, not one random case that made the news because it’s so unusual.
I like how she tossed in this bit for rear-protection:
“Don’t get me wrong: Being poor is still really terrible.”
Except that in the First World it really isn’t, or perhaps it is relative to the fact that there are people out there now who can buy islands and such. Of course, that way lies madness. Anyone can be s**t-poor, it takes a lot of luck or brilliance to be a billionaire.
I spent 4 years of my childhood in the woods of upstate NY being bathed with a hose in a plastic tub on the front lawn, in front of a half-completed tarped-over house that had to be bailed out when it rained. It still flooded from time to time. We had no stove and so cooked everything in an increasingly dilapidated gas grill. Thankfully we (usually) had electricity and always had running water.
Eventually my parents clawed their way out of poverty into a (from our perspective) luxurious lower-middle-class existence. The ceiling didn’t leak anymore! We had a washer and dryer! Interior walls and even doors! The only public assistance we used was a term of unemployment insurance for my dad between two jobs.
As bad as things were, we knew we had it better than billions of other people in the world. We never went hungry, for one thing. From the average BMI of those in the US under the poverty line I’d say few of them are either.
Except for a very few, being poor in the US is quite livable when compared with the lives of many people overseas and in the past. This is not to say that things can’t or shouldn’t be improved, just that it helps to have a clear-eyed view of the actual state of things.
“Being poor is still really terrible”
Well, as long as that’s the only conversation we’re allowed to have, further welfare benefits for the permanent Black and brown underclass, especially extra funding for poor little children in broken homes, paid for by taking resources away from the White middle class, thereby preventing them from having children because they use their future-time orientation to choose not to have children they can’t afford, is the only policy we’re going to enact.
I didn’t realize you had it so hard, Scipio — but it seems you turned out alright. It certainly didn’t impair your taste in reading material.
Welfare today actually nets you more than working a minimum wage job. And when you have to work two jobs just to break even, why do it? Why do things like asbestos cleanup for less? The incentives are completely perverted, and it doesn’t take a Luttwak to understand what the better deal is.
And speaking of television, it’s not all dark: 5 Reasons Why Duck Dynasty Is a Great All-American Show.
I watched the pilot episode earlier today, and the show has its charm. You get things like: “Beavers are just like the Vietcong; they come out at night and leave holes behind.”
And another story from the New York Post: When welfare pays better than work.
Slovenian Guest:
“And, while many anti-poverty activists decry low-wage jobs, even starting at a minimum-wage job can be a springboard out of poverty.”
Interesting claim. What’s the evidence? If this is all observational studies I’m going to call BS.