Sex
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CURIOUS Faythe Levine saw a "vintage appeal" in shots of a woman in negligee.
Katrina Wittkamp for The New York Times
UNCENSORED The creators of Found have compiled an R-rated version.
IN a heap of trash on a Manhattan street you find the discarded diary of a young woman. It is titled "The Secret Me No One Knows About."
Put aside the matter of why you are poking through garbage. The diary proves to be a 120-page, X-rated chronicle of love and sex illustrated by the author, apparently an artist.
You read it; you keep it. Eventually you copy nine pages and send them, anonymously but with a note explaining their provenance, to Jason Bitner, who puts them in a drawer in his desk in his office in Chicago.
Mr. Bitner is a creator of Found Magazine, an annual publication that showcases personal detritus (mostly lost photographs and notes) in a style that has been described by critics as "punk-collagist." In the last four years, hundreds of people have sent Mr. Bitner and Davy Rothbart, the magazine's other founder, items that they have found on park benches, in abandoned houses, under Coke machines — wherever things are left behind. Some of the items were inappropriate for Found — namely the prurient Polaroids, smutty journals and raunchy drawings that Mr. Bitner secreted in his drawer. Now more than 125 of them, including the excerpt from that young woman's diary, have been collected in a new 80-page volume, Dirty Found No. 1, which went on sale last week at independent bookstores, Tower Records and www.foundmagazine.com.
The appeal of Dirty Found is hard to define. Like much found culture, the publication offers readers an appealing mix of voyeurism and sociology — or possibly just voyeurism masked as sociology. Mr. Bitner said it provides "neat little insights into how we all deal with sex and sexuality, lust and anger, love."
"People seem to see it as a sort of mini-Kinsey Report," he said. "Or maybe it's more like the letters in Hustler. I don't know."
Mr. Bitner concedes, though, that Dirty Found is not particularly erotic. Few of the photographs depict sex acts; most show scantily clad or nude individuals in poor lighting (faces are obscured). The drawings are salacious and scatological doodles, many of which feature absurdly large genitals. The notes and journal entries tend toward B-grade erotica without benefit of a spell-checker. Fetishism is exemplified by a shot of a bound man receiving an enema. (Apparently there are 399 other — somewhat redundant — photos in this series, found discarded following an estate sale in Los Angeles.)
"The sophisticated sex browser will not be turned on by this," said Dr. Gloria G. Brame, an author, sex therapist and blogger based in Athens, Ga. "As a sexologist, I see its value as anthropological."
Faythe Levine, a Milwaukee artist and designer, is one of Found's "expert finders," or frequent contributors. Among her contributions to Dirty Found are three Polaroids of a woman posing in a red negligee and heels, which she found tucked in a used book. "I don't see these pictures as particularly erotic, it's true, although it certainly feels weird when you find bawdy stuff, like you are peeking into someone else's life," Ms. Levine said.
She added, in reference to the woman's oversized curly hairdo, the bedroom's wood paneling and the multicolored bed quilt, "I think the photos have a kind of retro vintage appeal, a kitsch quality, and people are drawn to that."
Similarly, John Orth, a musician in Gainesville, Fla., and another expert finder, seems more interested in details in the images than in the images themselves. Mr. Orth contributed a series of semicomic line drawings of men in various tawdry sexual situations that he found scattered on Honore Street during a visit to Chicago.
"The sheer number of drawings made it a special find," he said. "They are drawn on paper from some kind of sales ledger, implying they were done at work. They have a sort of R. Crumb quality and seem so specific to a person. Most finds are so cryptic."
Mr. Bitner and his finders believe that if the images in Dirty Found draw you in, it is because they tease the imagination more than the libido. Each image, lacking a context, requires the reader to conjure one.
"When you look at these images as found objects you tend to look past the person" pictured, Mr. Orth said, and to focus instead on clues in the background. "It requires a much more dense reading. You start looking at things that are on the wall."
Dr. Brame, who is an expert on sadomasochistic and fetish sexuality, is skeptical about what she calls this "deconstructionist approach," and also about the entertainment value of Dirty Found. "It begs the question, who wants to look at what other poor miserable saps are doing?" she said. "People want the erotic fantasy. They want Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt. This is grainy. It's for people who watch IFC."
"Maybe I'm too jaded," she added after a moment.
Dr. Brame did see scientific value in one particular find, a handwritten letter posted on a light pole on the side of a road in Worcester, Mass., from a 40-year-old male virgin desperately seeking his first sexual partner. She said it suggests a vastly underreported intimacy problem.
Professional sexologists generally seem to have difficulty getting into the spirit of Dirty Found. Dr. William A. Granzig, a professor and dean of clinical psychology at Maimonides University in North Miami Beach and the founder of the American Board of Sexology, said he is more interested in the people who find, and keep, bawdy trash, than in the reaction of potential readers to Dirty Found. "If you found a dirty letter nine years ago, why would you hold onto it? Is it a fetish object? That's my real question."
Fetish may be a strong word for what Mr. Bitner, the editor, describes as a form of "show and tell."
The prototypical dirty find may be Kat McCurry's. Over the course of a year Ms. McCurry found a series of cut-out photos of nude and underwear-clad bodies — sans heads — on a stretch of Frankfort Avenue in Louisville, Ky. One linking factor is that many of the photo subjects wear oversize white panties.
"The film was processed in the late 70's and early 80's," Ms. McCurry wrote in a note accompanying her submission to Dirty Found. "Why did they appear in the late 90's?" she went on, referring to the cutouts. "Why the granny panties? So many questions."
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Fashion Week in London:
Guests arriving Tuesday for a memorial service for the fashion editor Isabella Blow, who died in May.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/09/19/fashion/shows/20070920LONDON_7.html
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FILM
More Flowers, Different Dustbins
But why should you let the recycling end there? Tonight, Anthology Film Archives lets you be the film curator in a series they call “Lost/Found/Dead: Choose Your Own Adventure.” The movie house’s professionals select — but don’t watch — recently donated or dumpster-dived reels; the audience is presented with the titles, and through a process of discussion, argument and democratic voting, you get to pick which will be screened. If you end up watching a double-projection of Ronald Reagan juxtaposed with a rat dissection — which is what happened the last time they tried this — well, you have only yourselves to blame.
EYES, EARS AND OTHER ORIFICES: MORE ODDITIES FROM AMERICA'S FOREMOST 16MM COLLECTORS
UNESSENTIAL CINEMA PRESENTS: LOST/FOUND/DEAD: CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
For many, September signals the return to school. At Anthology it means yet another awe-inspiring weekend of orphan movies, found footage and cheap door prizes from America's foremost 16mm film collectors. From educational reels to medical atrocities, this year's installment promises nothing less than a total cinematic maelstrom.
The series kicks off with a stimulating installment of Anthology's UNESSENTIAL CINEMA series presented by Archivist Andrew Lampert. This special show will feature a generous selection of deranged detritus up from the darkest corners of our basement. Skip Elsheimer, the original A/V Geek, arrives with filmstrip projector in hand for an evening of films about nutrition, nourishment and not-so-subtle product placement. Those who have seen Skip's shows revere his unerring ability to discover the most delusional and delightful educational films ever foisted upon children. Stephen Parr, of Oddball Films and the San Francisco Media Archive, has threatened to bring a potent and confounding concoction of seedy and questionable clips from his celluloid reservoir. There is always a touch of class in Parr's trash and you never know what goods he will unveil. Greg Pierce, of Pittsburgh's Orgone Archive, one-ups his previous perilous programs with an evening's worth of medical footage that will be as easy on the eyes as it is possibly hard on the brain. Expect a pre-op/post-op parade of cuts, splices and almost incisions guaranteed to burn an impression onto your retinas.
A couple years back UNESSENTIAL CINEMA presented a memorable evening called CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE. Eleven films were pre-selected from Anthology's vast vaults of unknown, unscreened and unclasssifiable goodies. The hitch is that we only had time to watch eight of them. No information other than titles was given to our faithful audience who then had to decide, debate and vote on what we would screen. Totally incongruous, filled with chance turns and rife with bizarre associations, what followed was a frantic show loaded with hot debate, sharp comments and the overlapping double-projection of the Reagans with the dissection of a rat. Tonight, we return to this simple concept for yet another fateful test of our fragile democratic process in action. Reels will be chosen from recent donations, discoveries and dumpster dives. We can't really tell you what else to expect, which is why you will have to be here to learn more. This is how the game is played.
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http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/introducing-this-blog/
September 18, 2007, 11:45 pm
“I was born in 1953. Like the rest of my generation, I took the America I grew up in for granted – in fact, like many in my generation I railed against the very real injustices of our society, marched against the bombing of Cambodia, went door to door for liberal candidates. It’s only in retrospect that the political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation’s history.”
That’s the opening paragraph of my new book, The Conscience of a Liberal. It’s a book about what has happened to the America I grew up in and why, a story that I argue revolves around the politics and economics of inequality.
I’ve given this New York Times blog the same name, because the politics and economics of inequality will, I expect, be central to many of the blog posts – although I also expect to be posting on a lot of other issues, from health care to high-speed Internet access, from productivity to poll analysis. Many of the posts will be supplements to my regular columns; I’ll be using this space to present the kind of information I can’t provide on the printed page – especially charts and tables, which are crucial to the way I think about most of the issues I write about.
In fact, let me start this blog off with a chart that’s central to how I think about the big picture, the underlying story of what’s really going on in this country. The chart shows the share of the richest 10 percent of the American population in total income – an indicator that closely tracks many other measures of economic inequality – over the past 90 years, as estimated by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. I’ve added labels indicating four key periods. These are:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/09/19/opinion/19krugman2.533.jpg
The Long Gilded Age: Historians generally say that the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era around 1900. In many important ways, though, the Gilded Age continued right through to the New Deal. As far as we can tell, income remained about as unequally distributed as it had been the late 19th century – or as it is today. Public policy did little to limit extremes of wealth and poverty, mainly because the political dominance of the elite remained intact; the politics of the era, in which working Americans were divided by racial, religious, and cultural issues, have recognizable parallels with modern politics.
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=11223121
The Great Compression: The middle-class society I grew up in didn’t evolve gradually or automatically. It was created, in a remarkably short period of time, by FDR and the New Deal. As the chart shows, income inequality declined drastically from the late 1930s to the mid 1940s, with the rich losing ground while working Americans saw unprecedented gains. Economic historians call what happened the Great Compression, and it’s a seminal episode in American history.
Middle class America: That’s the country I grew up in. It was a society without extremes of wealth or poverty, a society of broadly shared prosperity, partly because strong unions, a high minimum wage, and a progressive tax system helped limit inequality. It was also a society in which political bipartisanship meant something: in spite of all the turmoil of Vietnam and the civil rights movement, in spite of the sinister machinations of Nixon and his henchmen, it was an era in which Democrats and Republicans agreed on basic values and could cooperate across party lines.
The great divergence: Since the late 1970s the America I knew has unraveled. We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared: between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.
Most people assume that this rise in inequality was the result of impersonal forces, like technological change and globalization. But the great reduction of inequality that created middle-class America between 1935 and 1945 was driven by political change; I believe that politics has also played an important role in rising inequality since the 1970s. It’s important to know that no other advanced economy has seen a comparable surge in inequality – even the rising inequality of Thatcherite Britain was a faint echo of trends here.
On the political side, you might have expected rising inequality to produce a populist backlash. Instead, however, the era of rising inequality has also been the era of “movement conservatism,” the term both supporters and opponents use for the highly cohesive set of interlocking institutions that brought Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich to power, and reached its culmination, taking control of all three branches of the federal government, under George W. Bush. (Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy.)
Because of movement conservative political dominance, taxes on the rich have fallen, and the holes in the safety net have gotten bigger, even as inequality has soared. And the rise of movement conservatism is also at the heart of the bitter partisanship that characterizes politics today.
Why did this happen? Well, that’s a long story – in fact, I’ve written a whole book about it, and also about why I believe America is ready for a big change in direction.
For now, though, the important thing is to realize that the story of modern America is, in large part, the story of the fall and rise of inequality.
> > >
Krugman is entirely correct in writing
“It’s only in retrospect that the political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation’s history.””
Indeed, he may well be understating his case. Edward Rubenstein (see National Data) has shown that Median Household Income has fallen for all groups since 2000. The fall for blacks is astounding, -8.0%. This will almost certainly be the first modern economic expansion where median incomes failed to reach their prior peak…
However, he has not made any attempt to explain why this period of growth has failed the American people so badly. The words immigration, trade, and outsourcing, are conspicuous by their absence.
It is a sad day when the American people can learn a lot more about what is wrong the economy by listening to Lou Dobbs than someone with a Ph.D. in economics.
— Posted by Peter Schaeffer
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3.
September 19th,
2007
1:52 am
wow.
yay!
congratulations on your blog!
— Posted by me
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4.
September 19th,
2007
1:55 am
“the great reduction of inequality that created middle-class America between 1935 and 1945 was driven by political change”
The chart shows most of the fall occurring in the 1940-1942 period. The political change of the time was war. Domestic social reform was put on hold to win the war.
Why inequality didn’t decline under the New Deal and then crashed as war production ramped up is unclear. My guess is that slack labor markets yield high inequality and very tight markets even out the income distribution. However, the fall in inequality is so sharp and fast that even WWII may not suffice as an explanation. Perhaps the combination of war production and price/wage controls may be correct.
I have seen some claims that income inequality declined sharply during WWI. The Piketty/Saez data support this assertion.
— Posted by Peter Schaeffer
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5.
September 19th,
2007
2:07 am
Mr. Krugman,
This is great news that you’ll be posting your keen insights in a free forum.That said,I’ll still buy your book.
From the start of this administration you’ve called it as you’ve seen it,whether it was popular at the time or not. No opinion poll based columns, which has become increasingly rare in this age of the timid(at best)media.
And by printing the truth as you saw it,you’ve been right and have done your country a great service.Many peope who may have still been silent are speaking out now.
You and the late,great Molly Ivins have spoken out more strongly about the abuses of this administration than anyone with a wide newspaper readership that I can think of.
That’s pretty good company to be in.
— Posted by G. Stover
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6.
September 19th,
2007
2:14 am
Dear Dr. Krugman,
Thank you very much for the voice you have raised. I am looking forward to the perspective you bring to these important issues at this pivotal point in time.
— Posted by Ed Guerrant
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7.
September 19th,
2007
2:41 am
What I do not understand is why the majority of Americans have been voting time and time again for a party which would hurt them. Is it because preventing abortion and same sex marriage is more important to the Americans than a good meal, access to free health services and the perception of respect from the rest of the world? Is it religion then? Or is it that only the news that shape that worldview are allowed to be spread by the media corporations? Is it the private ownership of media corporations and the cynical use that owners make of them?
— Posted by Carlo Geneletti
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8.
September 19th,
2007
3:08 am
What about a world like the great compression that also let the rich gain ground? or is that just an oxymoron by your thinking? -aliberal tinker
— Posted by Andrew Sturgill
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9.
September 19th,
2007
3:38 am
Fasten your seat belts folks, this is going to be fun.
— Posted by SamEllison
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10.
September 19th,
2007
3:53 am
You seem to assume that inequality is bad. Why?
— Posted by Realist
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11.
September 19th,
2007
4:16 am
The most chickenhawked war in U.S. history unravels before us in Iraq. That’s “the other defeat” for the Ba$e Elite Wealth run amok. It’s not just treasure but blood. “Papertrail Fighters” …”Deathstar Ye$men” …”Private Sectoroids”. And then insult to injury–that they’ve managed to stake an abjectly phony claim of moral high ground, thanks to the reigning Democracy Surrender Monkeys that define status quo Fourth Estate.
— Posted by Artist General
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12.
September 19th,
2007
4:20 am
I really think everything can be simplified. When all elected officials are wealthy, how do you think policy making will favor the poor?
— Posted by Arthur R. Besemer HMC USN (Ret.
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13.
September 19th,
2007
4:21 am
Excluding capital gains! What a joke!
— Posted by JoeJoe
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14.
September 19th,
2007
5:37 am
I appreciate your analysis of inequality, and I think it is the source of many problems. However, two things jump out at me from your interesting chart. First, when the top 10% income group drops from the mid 40% range to the lower 30% range, that is still a hugely unequal! 10% of the population getting 32% of the income leaves 90% of the population to share 68% of the income; the top ten have, per capita, something over 4 times the income per capita compared to the rest.
Second, as you note in the text, the biggest recent change is the tilt not to the top 10% but to the top 10; or, to be more expansive, to the top 0.1% (296% increase in income since 1979). Indeed, it would be interesting to see a similar graph, showing the distribution of the top 0.1% as opposed to the rest of the top 10%. My guess is it would look like a rocket taking of at Cape Canaveral.
And now we aren’t talking about people with 4 times as much income but maybe something like 10,000 times as much income. Anyone who has ever fantasized about winning $25,000,000 in the PowerBall lottery knows how it would transform his life. But there are people out there routinely making (er, taking home) that much money each month. One of those 20 and 2 guys making a billion a year is making 10,000 times as much as someone making $100,000 (and I think she would be way up in the top 10%!!)
Now THAT’S inequality!
I enjoy your column, and this is fun %^)
dan
— Posted by Dan Moerman
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15.
September 19th,
2007
5:43 am
Dear Mr Krugman,
You have well made the point that just as fall in inequality was CREATED & not evolved, the rise too has been CREATED. The belief in tax cutting could well be out of a genuine conviction that overall economy grows fastest by this and the poorer too benefit even if not in the same scale, even while acknowledging that greed of the wealthy is the contributor. The ‘Thatcherites’ must be considering themselves pragmatists believing that curbing wealth accumulation could inhibit investments that fuel growth of overall economy. If public spirited economists could educate them and the society through an intense campaign with facts and figures [your chart being one example] to reveal the horrendous skewing that extremes of their strategy have wrought, I think political compulsions will veer policies towards a fairer sharing and a better quality of life of the less fortunate segments of society.
— Posted by SS Natarajan
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16.
September 19th,
2007
5:46 am
I am so delighted to see this new blog. It will be on my constant reading list along with whatever columns Paul writes. A voice of sanity in a swirling world of obfuscation and spin. Thank you and I plan to buy your new book as soon as it’s released.
Our country is getting to a very sorry state of caring for others, our own as well as others. Sad.
— Posted by Mary Kenaston
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17.
September 19th,
2007
5:50 am
The US needs more columnists like you who make a stand for the middle class! Thanks for this fine story, Mr. Krugman, and it’s fantastic that the wall finally was brought down, so that now more readers can hear your important voice! Again, thank you and keep up the great work!
— Posted by Gray
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18.
September 19th,
2007
5:55 am
Dear Paul:
I guess the Times editors and financial people caught on to reality. Welcome back. I have missed your column terribly. Mark
— Posted by Mark Gary Blumenthal, MD, MPH
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19.
September 19th,
2007
6:13 am
This is a great article. It summarizes what real liberals are all about. I was in graduate school when Paul Krugman was born. America was full of hope, promise, and good will then.
— Posted by Sheine
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20.
September 19th,
2007
6:32 am
I have almost always agreed with Dr. Krugman except when he speaks of globalization. He always speaks of it as he would like it to be implemented instead of the way corporate America has crafted it.
I love this graph and almost everything he says about it. But I don’t know why he won’t admit that globalization is responsible for exporting American jobs and American capital that was built on the backs of American labor. It is the main driver of the impoverishment of the middle class.
BTW, I was born in 1937.
— Posted by Jerry Lobdill
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21.
September 19th,
2007
6:32 am
Inequality is indeed a key (negative) feature of our time, and I am thankful to Professor Krugman for concentrating on this issue. The richest 1% in the US (and other countries) is accumulating an unjustified amount of economic resources and thus political power. I also agree that this has been running by political decisions. Yet I am always surprised by Krugman’s claim that globalization does not have anything to do (it is clearly the neoclassical economist in him!). The liberalization of trade and, especially, financial flows (both political decisions) have both contributed to shift economic and political power, no? Let me give just two examples:
1. By creating a threat of outsourcing (used by firms and governments all over the world), globalization has weakness the political power of trade unions;
2. More importantly, financial deregulation and liberalization has contributed to consolidate a “winner takes all” society and expand the operations of hedge funds. It has also facilitated speculation in all kinds of assets—something that is mainly possible for the rich.
I wonder if any new political agenda should not include a careful rethinking of the national and international in the current economic environment. I look forward to reading Krugman’s book for an answer.
— Posted by Diego Sanchez Ancochea
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22.
September 19th,
2007
6:34 am
Bill McKibbin at a recent lecture in Vermont asserted that the most important election in the past 50 years was Carter vs. Reagan. He believess that in that election America was given a choice between community and individualism. The “hyper-individualism” that evolved following that election led not only to the economic disparity you describe so well in your columns, but to the wasteful use of energy as “rugged individuals” bought ever bigger cars and ever biggger houses that werre further and further from the places they worked…. Both political parties implicitly endorse this consumerism that results from hyper-individualism by feeding the idea that if inequality was eliminated everyone would be able to afford Hummers and McMansions instead of urging us consume less. I don’t hear any Democrats getting the notion of sacrifice into the political conversation— be in by raising taxes on the rich or taxing gasoline like they do in the rest of the world— because they’ve been cowed into submission.
— Posted by Wayne Gersen
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23.
September 19th,
2007
6:34 am
I am so happy you are “free” again (although I will pay for your book without complaints). Your insights are the reason I log on to the NYT as they provide some sense of the “real” US for someone living outside the US.
I grew up in the US during the 60s and remember attending civil rights marches with my father and being aware of social justice issues, the idea being that all Americans should live in dignity–and my father was a Republican! I know it wasn´t perfect then (my parent´s work in inner city Philly or the Appalachian mountains showed that), but I still think that things are so much worse now–perhaps the most disturbing observation is that there does not even appear to be a mainstream dream or goal of a more just and equitable society. With the rise of both religious fundamentalism and market ideology it appears that if one is “poor” or suffers any sort of injustice it is for one of two reasons or both: 1)one did something in the eyes of god to deserve being poor, 2)one did something that was not market efficient and since we are all rational choice “units”, thus it is one´s fault too.
We need a return of some public ethical language grounded in some intelligent economic policy and political analysis, whereby we take collective responsibility at least for the laws that we pass and people we vote into place.
— Posted by Cynthia
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24.
September 19th,
2007
6:43 am
As always, a good read from Mr. Krugman. The impressive feature of our current era is that those in the lower economic range have become cheerleaders of their own demise–kind of like “What’s The Matter With Kansas”.
— Posted by Bill Hargiss
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25.
September 19th,
2007
6:58 am
Another chart I often contemplate is the pie-shaped representation of corporate tax in relation to individual tax as share of the total. Used to be 20% corporate, now down to about 14%. While these same corporate interests rely on our purchasing power for their profits. What’s wrong with this picture?
— Posted by Ruth
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26.
September 19th,
2007
7:06 am
This is not only the story of America, but of the human race. Life is not fair, and the best we can do is study history, and abuse, and try to make a system of government that addresses criminal acts, not Darwinism. We will only become frustrated if we try to redistribute ability. Fair opportunity will never guarantee fair outcome. I can have all the golf lesson on earth and I will never be fit to caddy for Tiger. So far the only system of government that tries to keep a level table is America. We have room for improvement, but we are free to seek it…try keeping that in mind when condemning America to the junk heap.. our immigration crunch proves what the underpriveleged people see in America.
— Posted by roneida
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27.
September 19th,
2007
7:07 am
I too grew up in middle class America in the 50’s. My father went from the farm to steel worker then to WWII Army pilot. When he returned in ‘46 he began selling Cadillacs — the symbol that one had “arrived” at the top of “new heap”. He began driving a Cadillac too, and my family entered the then upper middle class. Yet, my friends at school and in the neighborhood were from all levels of the middle: blue collar to country club. I agree there wasn’t the disparity of socialization that we see today (but there were some extremely poor — mostly people marginalized in low paying jobs by ethnicity or race).
At 18 in 1966, I went to a retail junior college in Boston, and worked for high end specialty stores until 1992. At Saks and Neimans, we catered to the 1% who never let us down. They were spenders during inflation and recessions — even 1989 — not a sales blip downward at the finer stores.
Trouble was that I wasn’t going anywhere salary-wise vs. cost of living in San Francisco or gaining any satisfaction from serving those who had to have $1,000 dresses. Disgusted, I returned to college (liberal arts undergrad and graduate) and eventually became a social worker (MSW) and now work in Philadelphia to serve those at the other side of the Neiman/Saks coin.
Unlike my former 1% clients, the future the lower 1/5 living in poverty, psychiatrically disabled, addicted or homeless are held in the balance daily by politicians — the conservatives who want to abandon them.
In preparation for the days of real trickle, I’ve added fundraiser to my skills. Now, the 1% realize that they aren’t not taking it with them and it’s like a fire sale. Alas, with 280 billion dollars of charity flying around, their conservative financial advisors are telling them to give to Africa and other countries of potential golbal labor, or egotistally they’re self directing their giving to religious institutions and colleges to have a building named after them. Their last and least choice: giving to those with mental health issues and poverty in the US.
Quickly, where is the next FDR?
— Posted by Dixie Palmer
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28.
September 19th,
2007
7:11 am
Hooray for Paul Krugman! Please continue to tell the story, again and again, in as many ways as you can. Help stoke the backlash, for Lord knows why it has not yet happened. As for me, I’m ready…
— Posted by bobinkc
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29.
September 19th,
2007
7:13 am
Bless you, Paul Krugman. I was raised in Dallas and Lubbock, Texas, son of a Goldwater Republican but with a recessive Democratic gene. I grew up around the religious right (before they were so-named), the libertarians, and the John Birchers, who along with the neo-cons, now run the country. I even had a dose of Dick Armey’s economics in college. I was active in Texas democratic politics for years. I know these people inside and out. Of all the analysts of this administration I read, you have them nailed the best. The cynicism required to prolong this war in order to set up a Democratic president for evisceration through a who-lost-Iraq debate is by no means beyond them. For them it is all about power. The war on terror is simply a device for sustaining and expanding a 70-year war to roll-back the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the progressive civil rights and environmental policies of the 60s. I’m looking forward to reading your blog.
— Posted by Philip Diehl, Florence, Italy
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30.
September 19th,
2007
7:14 am
Excellent start! I believe there are NO problems facing our 231 year-old experiment in ‘Liberty and Justice For All’ that cannot be fixed, but people have to hear more voices like yours, and start being heard: the organized radial right does orchestrated ‘letter-to-the-local editor’ campaigns to drum home their neo-con idiocy, and make their numbers look artificially larger: the progressives must do likewise. I look forward to more of your stuff!
— Posted by Martin Bakken Jr.
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31.
September 19th,
2007
7:14 am
I think Professor Krugman has completely lost his mind. His black and white view of American history - with all Republicans as evil and FDR as the Saviour - would put most Marxists to shame. Maybe he wants to get back at the world because hs is such a short man. He has become the modern version of Marat. Charlotte Corday where are you?
— Posted by Peter Schneider
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32.
September 19th,
2007
7:17 am
Something we must do in this country: To try to get the American public, most of them not being wealthy, to vote in their best interests.
Like health, economic survival ranks at the top of the list. Without either one, people will sink into the depths of despair, losing whatever potential we have left to improve the the quality of life of the individual and of the nation.
— Posted by James Cook
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33.
September 19th,
2007
7:22 am
Delighted, absolutely delighted, to see you free from the firewall at last, Dr. Krugman.
Agree with you about America yesterday and today. Looking forward to reading your book.
— Posted by clio
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34.
September 19th,
2007
7:35 am
Mr. Krugman:
I was born in Minnesota in 1954, raised on the knees of Humphrey and Eugene McCarthey. When Reagan told middle America that the tax money belonged to them and not some government, they bought into this idea of “looking out for me”. Before that, most of us had very little, so it was beneficial to stick together with unions, churches, and government. We know Watergate was the crack the broke our trust in institutions.
I remember in my youth how we had money to build schools, now we don’t even have money to finance music and other after-school activities.
Of course, we’re talking white-bread middle class here and things have gotten so much worse for black people. We now have many of them quarantined in deep pockets of blight that is a world without hope. They like Iraqi’s, have no sense of security in there homes, or opportunity for education. I don’t know how long it’s been since you’ve been in one of these areas. but I promise you, it is no exageration to say, they don’t look much different than the bombed out neighborhoods of Baghdad. There is so much lawlessness that cops are afraid to go into these neighborhoods. Only the strong survive - many don’t as there are almost 300 murders in these Philly areas. Or we put them in cages. One in ten are in the “legal system”.
So what have I been doing about it? Nothing. I’ve been looking out for me and my family. I was a union member for 15 years and went to night school for 13 years to get my undergraduate degree. My two sons are on their own now, but I’m still looking out for me by focusing on saving for retirement. I feel guilty that I haven’t done much to be a part of the answer. But I’m glad I now have a voice in you Mr. Krugman. Please speak LOUDLY.
thanks
Gary Krause
— Posted by gary krause
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35.
September 19th,
2007
7:37 am
The chart is very informative. How about another one, comparing the U.S. with other G-8 countries or the OECD average?
— Posted by Jim Lane
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36.
September 19th,
2007
7:41 am
I too have the conscience of a Liberal. I also enjoyed the “golden” age of middle class America as I was growing up (and protested Vietnam and racial injustice in the 60s).
I agree that America is ready for change, but the conditions are not right for a BIG change yet. I think it will take a great depression to create a great COMPRESSION. Also factor in the threat of communism to our American economic system, back in the 30s and 40s. We HAD to prove that capitalism can work for the good of all, back then. There is no such need now.
I enjoy your work immensely, having “met” you on a Fresh Air interview back in 2001 or so.
— Posted by Randy Zercher
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37.
September 19th,
2007
7:41 am
Paul, an exception piece that is as accurate as it is somber. The rise of the authoritarians and neoconservatives - and their manifest drive to create oligarchies for business and a plutocratic society – should generate immense concern and desire for a seminal change, but will it?
As a progressive research writer and author of four years now, I find a vast majority of Americans apathetic, dejected and complacent, rather than galvanized and poised to affect desperately needed change. Among other causes, “distracted consumerism” may be, in my judgment, a core cause.
When O.J. Simpson’s arrest garners the lion’s share of media coverage, while the restoration of a keystone of democracy, habeas corpus, receives only a cursory glance, I find myself disturbed and worried that Americans have truly lost our way and our roots as an egalitarian society.
As contemporaries of it, are we too myopic to see we are living through another gilded age and only history, long after this era has ended, will correctly narrate the events of the first part of the 21st century?
- Frank J Ranelli, Associate Editor, Op Ed News
— Posted by Frank J Ranelli
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38.
September 19th,
2007
7:42 am
yeah, I grew up in the 1950s and remember that great middle class you are talking about…where we were all equally poor. And I remember the 60s very well when the Federal government led by liberals decided that they could just take it from those who were trying to get ahead and give it to those who were not thus trying to bring everyone down another notch.
This is not a ‘liberal’ blog unless you think that liberal is a synonym for socialist. Income redistribution is a great idea unless you happen to be the one whose income is being redistributed…
— Posted by GUYK
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39.
September 19th,
2007
8:01 am
America’s cultural DNA as a nation, thanks to our Founding Fathers, is to be secular, centrist, and anti-authoritarian. The conservatives badly misread the country and grossly over-estimated their ability to change it. The “populist backlash” you looked for earlier is now happenning, perhaps a bit late for some of us, but is happening just the same.
— Posted by Dave Ramacitti
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40.
September 19th,
2007
8:02 am
I look forward to reading more. I have certainly wondered at the relatively passive demeanor of the disappearing middle class, as one who struggles to equal her middle class family income. Out of the myriad of possible causes, one strikes me as significant: the myth of “technology”, i.e., the ownership and networking of devices that allow us to “penetrate the secrets” of the financial world,and/or the information world - virtual participation Have we not mistaken the computer, the iphone, DSL, podcasts, overnight delivery to Asia,and the like,these possessions, and their potential, for what they signify to only a few - rising disposable income?
Have we come to settle for the “having”, as in indicator of status, rather than the insisting on hard gain?
— Posted by Julianne La Fond Hammond
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41.
September 19th,
2007
8:08 am
What an incredible article [and glory be, we didn’t have to pay to read it!] I feel certain that Paul Krugman is echoing the feelings of many Americans today. I see how my children must struggle to remain above water…hard working, smart, but always running on a treadmill.
Bravo to Krugman and his new series.
Carmen Noakes/Atlanta
— Posted by CM Noakes
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42.
September 19th,
2007
8:13 am
It is dissembling to say that middle class America was created “because strong unions, a high minimum wage, and a progressive tax system helped limit inequality” without saying that leaving the US economy on a war footing while it rebuilt the world under the Marshall Plan was a large contributor to American wellbeing. Its now a global economy and Mr. Krugman knows it. But he leaves out facts that don’t confirm his point. He is a liberal pundit, not an economist or an analyst.
— Posted by Robert
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43.
September 19th,
2007
8:15 am
I’m not a liberal. Take one look at the Duke faculties’ refusal to apologize for their vituperative attacks on the lacrosse team and you can see why. I lean a little toward social liberalism but I’m conservative fiscally. But I do agree 100% that the rise in inequality is an issue that needs correction. Personally I feel that in some ways we are entering the decline of our American western civilization similar to that of the Roman Empire or the British empire of the 1900’s. It seems that the powers that control our political and economic direction are intent on consolidating that power believing that once consolidated they can maintain it as a status quo. And I believe history has shown us many times that this doesn’t work. When the haves get so far above the have-nots that they stop considering their needs then the winds of change usually blow pretty hard. Just ask Marie Antoinette.
— Posted by Eff'n Higby
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44.
September 19th,
2007
8:18 am
I don’t have anything to add or say really (yet), since I agree with your views all the time. Heck, I don’t even agree with myself all of the time. I am just hoping to be the first comment on your new blog.
Anyway, I look forward to more graphs and tables related to your “dismal science” (just kidding).
It will give me even more ammunition when I start my rants about the dissolution of the America I also knew growing up (born in 1961).
I truly hope and am beginning to believe that as you said, “America is ready for a big change in direction.”
We desperately need to change.
Stay true. Stay strong. I love you man.
— Posted by bern futscher
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45.
September 19th,
2007
8:29 am
The saddest thing is that most people who vote for the “don’t tax the rich” party will never be rich and they are just taxing themselves more to make up for what was not paid by the rich.
— Posted by Frank Irvin
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46.
September 19th,
2007
8:31 am
I sent a copy of this article to both of my daughters, because while they have graduated from college,(one on her way to a PhD), the inequity in this country is one problem that cannot be solved by education. Only an explanation of history and political knowledge of a political nature can explain our present situation.
— Posted by Carol Doyle
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47.
September 19th,
2007
8:38 am
Paul, I will be looking for your book and will reserve my comments until then. I do have a pertinent question though. Why is it that most (if not all) opinion writers tend to overlook the massive effect WWII had on the economy and subsequent prosperity of our nation?
As a child of the depression, I know the impact the war had on my family and our ability to survive. Also usually overlooked is the impact that the GI bill had on the educational and income levels of the “average” American. First observation is that it moved a great number of people from the middle class into what is now considered “rich”. The term “Rich American” really needs to be redefined. All things considered, the income levels are set too low.
— Posted by Dick Jones
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48.
September 19th,
2007
8:41 am
I am a New Yorker living in Istanbul now. It is a paradigm of rapid economic and social change, operating against a struggle for balance between constitutionally mandated democratic values and the forces of Islamic fundamentalism. A more equitable distribution of wealth is also a key issue here and one that is essential to their future success as they sit on the threshold between Europe and the Middle East. I’ll be watching this blog with great interest.
— Posted by Walt Behnke
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49.
September 19th,
2007
8:48 am
Thank you, thank you for acting as a public, outspoken advocate for those of us who are not middle class and who face ever-increasing, insurmountable barriers to simply becoming financially viable. It is truly harrowing to watch with growing panic as the right wing wages merciless class warfare on us.
I was born in 1952. My parents stopped supporting me when I turned 18. I spent much of my adult life working my way toward a college education, and somehow managed to graduate magna cum laude in 2002 from an Ivy League university. At that time I developed a medical issue and was disabled with pain for the better part of five years. I have never collected any public assistance or disability benefits. I’m finally better physically, but I’ve lost everything financially. I’m now struggling to rebuild a completely destroyed life, but the resources and measures at my disposal to do so are meager.
It’s the most vile, hypocritical slap in the face to hear well-off conservatives preach about how my circumstances shouldn’t matter, that I need to “pull myself up by my bootstraps,” and that I should be a good sport about how unfair life is. I’m not sure when Americans came to lack a moral compass but we need urgently to reclaim it. I’m not a productive citizen. I do not contribute to the economy or to my community, or to the tax base. That ought to provide some incentive for us to lend a helping hand to people in my predicament. But even if it isn’t, can’t we address the immorality of treating us so harshly and with such willful callousness? Is this really what has become of the American character, and is it reversible?
— Posted by Patty Quinn
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50.
September 19th,
2007
8:53 am
For me the real mystery is how did folks of meager means, who benefitted greatly from the advantages of the rising middle class era, become enamoured with the conservative movement. The only clue I have is that for some of them, they went to college (the first in their families), join the professional class and worked for big corporations. Then these same folks who benefited from a strong public education and community services later vote to dismantle these very institutions that allowed them to suceed. This disturbs me greatly, and yet these are folks I must spend holiday dinners with, so I must tread lightly.
— Posted by Kristen Strand-Tibbitts
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51.
September 19th,
2007
8:58 am
If I want economic analysis, I’d prefer to get it from someone who is not a rigid partisan. There are plenty of good economists out there and choosng to heed the word of the liberal Sean Hannity seems silly.
Can the Times get publish the work of an economist who is not also a strident partisan?
— Posted by Mike
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52.
September 19th,
2007
9:02 am
Looking at the U.S. — I mean, looking around it — it still seems like the middle class is richer than the middle class in a lot of other places. Could this have something to do with its seeming passivity? How threatened are the living standards of the middle class? Is the seeming well-to-do-ness of suburban neighborhoods increasingly a stage set like the Pullman villages of yore? How many people are actually tracking down?
— Posted by Esther Buddenhagen
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53.
September 19th,
2007
9:07 am
Hi Paul,
Welcome to the blogosphere and congratulations on the freeing of your column from the Times Select shackles.
I’m a firm believer that the destruction of the American middle class is one of the most dangerous developments in the last 40 years. I also believe that if you add to your chart the rise and fall of the percentage of union members in the workforce, you’ll see that they are almost identical. Organized labor was the primary ticket into the middle class and the concerted effort to destroy unions is bringing back the age of the Robber Barons.
I hope you’ll spend a little time discussing labor in this blog and I’m sure no matter what you opine on will be interesting. I look forward to being a regular reader. Good luck!
— Posted by Not the senator
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54.
September 19th,
2007
9:09 am
Eric Hobsbawm, in his four-volume history of modern Europe and the world, has pointed to what he calls “the crisis of the liberal state,” by which he means those structural difficiences in liberalism itself that tend toward inegalitarianism. These tendencies (as analyzed by Jeremy Rifkin in The European Dream) are particularly marked in the USA, given our strong inheritance of a European Enlightenment liberalism combined with Puritanism, a religious tradition that emphasizes the importance of individual earthly success as a sign of coveted and rare election to heaven. We need to see that liberal individualism has distinct limits and must be balanced (e.g., in universal single-payer health insurance) by recognition that each human being has collective interests, origins, and obligations as well as being, in the words of Adam Smith, “committed by nature to his own care.”
— Posted by Geoffrey Cocks
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55.
September 19th,
2007
9:09 am
I am thrilled to see you doing this and wish there were a way to get teachers in high schools and colleges/universities to use this in their classes. I teach at Penn State and teach about economic inequality in all my classes. I know you are well aware (and have contributed greatly to my own understanding) of how tax politics are a significant part of this picture of rising inequality. (I wrote a book that came out last year aimed at reframing tax policy as an important women’s issue; in case you are interested it is Taxes are a Woman’s Issue by Mimi Abramovitz and Sandra Morgen).
I find, however, that it is hard to get young people (outside of economics classes) to take on tax politics as important. Whether it is because it seems too complex, too dry, or too distant from their lives it is tough. That is why I am trying to imagine a way for your blog to become part of secondary and post-secondary classes — both to get the information out and to inspire real conversation about taxes, and NOT the way Bush tries to lure the young to “the ownership society” by striking fear in their hearts about Social Security for the elderly taking too much out of their pockets. Anyhow thanks; I plan to be a “regular”, Sandra Morgen
— Posted by Sandra Morgen
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56.
September 19th,
2007
9:10 am
The central concept explaining the return of gross inequality in American society is that of predation. A culture that values aggression of the strong against the weak inevitably becomes grossly unequal. It also becomes uncivilized. Predators control most American corporations and the American government. The evils of their predation have yet to be fully revealed. When the damage is fully understood, a new era of reform will commence.
— Posted by HH
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57.
September 19th,
2007
9:13 am
It appears to me that the Great Compression occurs about the time of Lend-Lease and the beginning of the War. Likewise, isn’t the time of middle-class America generally linked with the complete lack of competition from a developed world crushed by war damage. I won’t make any grand ideological claims, but I think the good ‘ol days of the 50’s and 60’s weren’t sustainable without the U.S. emerging as the only nearly unscathed developed nation.
— Posted by Joe
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58.
September 19th,
2007
9:13 am
I think part of the story of the great compression has to also include international factors. How much, for example, did the fear of international communism drive acquiescence by the elite in USA, allowing greater income equality? With the collapse of the international communist threat - we see more aggressive attempts by the elite to redistribute income to the wealthy.
— Posted by Eric Schwartz
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59.
September 19th,
2007
9:18 am
Your blog and book title immediately attracted my attention. As a liberal living in a very Republican area, my standard response to “How can you vote for …………?” has always been and continues to be, “It’s simple. I vote beyond myself.”
So I needed to read more about your catchy title, but with little luck. I hope your book (for the sake of sales) more clearly explains, to those of us economics-challenged individuals, terms like “movement conservative political dominance” and even the “safety net”. You lost me!
— Posted by Patricia Heidrich
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60.
September 19th,
2007
9:18 am
To make the graph more clear from a political perspective you might want to list who was president during the different time periods.
For example at the bottom of the graph indicate that Reagan was president from 1981 to 1989. From 1989 to 1993 it was Bush senior, from 1993 to 2001 it was Clinton and from 2001 until present Bush junior.
My question: Why did the divergence continue during Clinton’s presidency?
— Posted by Colleen
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61.
September 19th,
2007
9:21 am
Can’t say I’m all that convinced that “inequality” is back to 19th century levels. As the chart shows, in income perhaps (but with very different compositions: in the earlier period much more of it was to do with income from financial capital, rather than labour income, or human capital income if you prefer).
But other forms of inequality have shrunk dramatically: arguably, more important forms of inequality too. Of life spans, of calorie intake, of height (which reflect to a large extent greater equality of childhood nurtrition), of health care.
Concentrating solely upon income inequality does, I think, overstate the situation.
— Posted by Tim Worstall
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62.
September 19th,
2007
9:22 am
Mr. Krugman: Thank you so much for bringing these issues to the light of day in comprehensible language and with such passion. I am very much looking forward to these conversations.
It seems (finally) like it’s time to talk about “conscience”. It’s interesting that John W. Dean recently wrote a book called “Conservatives Without Conscience”. [For those who haven’t heard about it, he talks about it here: http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20070905.html ].
Also, there was a piece in the NYT recently by Jeffrey Rosen, which also had “conscience” as a topic, [“Conscience of a Conservative”]. It’s about Jack L. Goldsmith, a conservative lawyer who did not go along with John Yoo’s ideas about the Geneva Conventions. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/magazine/09rosen.html ?
I, too, have the feeling that “America is ready for a big change in direction”, and your knowledge and vision can help us all travel that road with clear heads and compassionate hearts. Let’s go!
— Posted by Fran N.
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63.
September 19th,
2007
9:26 am
Thank you, Mr. Krugman. Finally someone started to address the real issue. And in the NYT too. I am not the US citizen, but have been following the “evolution” of the US society since 1967, when I first visited this great country, on the student-exchange scholarship. I was concerned, not only because of “what happens there affects the rest of the world”, but also because I always considered the US my home away from home. After twenty or so visits, during the period you’ve accurately described as “middle class America”, and “the great divergence”, I’ve noticed that the big change is taking place. I couldn’t articulate that change to my friends, except by saying that my feeling is that the big greed is taking over. Now, you expressed that feeling of mine, and gave the greed its real meaning.
— Posted by Milan Zivkovic
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64.
September 19th,
2007
9:31 am
Paul, it seems to me that if Thomas Frank’s book is even remotely correct — his thesis being that many working class Republicans vote as they do over social issues — the most efficient way to bring about the collapse of the Republican coalition would be to accept the overruling Roe v. Wade and jettison support for gay marriage and hostility to Christianity from the liberal agenda. But one assumes you’re not in favor of such changes, so the problem comes down to the real (and unremarkable) reason why politics is more fractious: not because of conspiracies or movements, but because large numbers of Americans disagree with one another about issues that are very important to them, issues which are mutually irreconcilable.
— Posted by Simon
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65.
September 19th,
2007
9:36 am
Welcome to the blogosphere Mr. Krugman. I enjoy your columns and look forward to the copious charts and graphs posted here!
— Posted by DanF
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66.
September 19th,
2007
9:42 am
I am curious about one aspect to your chart that I did not see addressed: when I look at a chart of immigration levels to the U.S., it shows a very similar pattern as your graph. How much of income inequality can be explained by immigration levels?
— Posted by Michael Bumgardner
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67.
September 19th,
2007
9:54 am
A key element of conservative thinking about inequality is the idea that in a modern economy with an extensive division of labor, it is possible (in a *non-arbitrary* way) to quantify the value contributed by each person.
From this idea (and a little sloppy thinking), it follows that if one person is paid a billion dollars a year while another person is paid a Wal-Mart wage, then each simply receives the money equivalent of what he/she contributed to the economy. People who complain about inequality are a bunch of whiners who want to deny the rich their just rewards while giving handouts to the undeserving poor.
Dr. Krugman, it might help a lot of people if you addressed that issue.
(By the way, I used your international economics textbook as a student and I enjoyed it a great deal.)
— Posted by Miles
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68.
September 19th,
2007
10:01 am
I would prefer a Conscious Liberal to the Conscience of a Liberal. To suggest that the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich was due to a vast right-wing conspiracy is sheer lunacy. Undoubtedly there were institutions that were advocating for Reagan and Gingrich, but no consipiracy is capable of getting tens of millions of Americans to freely go to the polls on their own power and vote. I was born a Democrat but by the time I got to college, on Election Day, I put on my best suit and went to vote for Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan won 49 out of 50 states that year, and nearly two-thirds of the youth vote. I don’t mind that you hate conservatives. I just wish you could show some semblance of understanding of what we’re about. I am really shocked and dismayed how simplistic and self-serving your analysis is.
— Posted by Peter McFadden
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69.
September 19th,
2007
10:09 am
Wonderful! In the past one of the great virtues of America has been that when inequality grew large, something happened to reduce it. Your chart shows just one example. I hate to use this phrase, but the question today is whether we have reached the tipping point. Has inequality grow so much that the political power of the Rich and Super Rich will prevent the decline of inequality? Will inequality keep growing?
— Posted by Leonard S. Charlap
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70.
September 19th,
2007
10:15 am
While I agree that the America you grew up in was in most respects a better place than the one we inhabit today, your characterization of that time as “It was a society without extremes of wealth or poverty, a society of broadly shared prosperity” is likely to be attacked as overly sentimental.
My youth, spent about a decade before yours, was during a period of considerable poverty, especially among African Americans and those living in the rural south. Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty may or may not have been an effective way of dealing with this problem, but the problem itself was real enough.
My guess is that your graph correctly illustrates a shifting of income between the rich and the middle class, but it does little to compare the relative position of the poor in these various eras.
Also, income is only part of the story. A similar graph showing distributions of net worth might reveal even greater disparities. It is wealth rather than income that creates the differences we see in privilege and it is privilege that accounts for such abominations as the rise of G. W. Bush all the way to the presidency.
These are minor points. I appreciate your insights on the state of our society and find you to be one of the very few in the press who speak without unreasonable deference to established ideas and conventional wisdom.
— Posted by George Mandeville
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71.
September 19th,
2007
10:16 am
Could you please explain how a rise in the top marginal tax rate would translate to a drop in the share of the richest 10 percent of the American population in total income? Plus, how do we know would that lower wages for the richest 10% would translate into higher wages for the rest of the country, as opposed to higher corporate profits?
— Posted by A
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72.
September 19th,
2007
10:17 am
Fair enough, but we need to discuss how the “more trade at all costs” mantra has contributed to the weakening of the middle class and especially the blue collar sector.
“Lose you job but shop at Wal-Mart” is not cutting it.
The mad rush to globalization may be helping the Chinese but is hurting Americans, despite the reassurances of (tenured) economists that we can build a prosperous service economy.
— Posted by save_the_rustbelt
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73.
September 19th,
2007
10:21 am
I share your concern regarding the rise of economic inequality in America, but I wonder if politics played as dominate a role as you imply regarding the great “compression”. Following WWII most of the world’s productive capacity lay in ruins, except America’s. Much of our capacity was directed, through mechanisms such as the Marshall Plan, to the rebuilding of European and Japanese industrial infrastructure. American industry had little competition in its role as key rebuilder of the western world and Japan. This allowed American workers to enjoy higher wages as American companies provided much of that capital equipment then would otherwise have been the case. I believe that dynamic was a major underlying factor in the “compression” shown in your graph. As other world economies recovered and became competitive in a more global economy, American wages came under pressure. Certainly, a better political response could have recognized this trend and reacted more effectively on behalf of the American worker, but political action is usually reactive not pro-active. So,the great “compression” owes much to the very rare and special physical and economic circumstances prevailing immediately following the War.
— Posted by David Tolwinski
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74.
September 19th,
2007
10:23 am
What is the significance of the share of income of the top 10%? The population in the US living below the poverty line is lower than that of Canada, Germany, the UK…(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_p ercentage_of_population_living_in_poverty). Considering wealth and income are only a segment of what makes a society flourish the importance of this chart pales even further.
— Posted by Matt Johansen
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75.
September 19th,
2007
10:25 am
What roll did WW2 have in creating what you call Middle Class America? Just wondering. Didn’t increased military expenditure during and post-war create the manufacturing boom that employed so many Americans?
— Posted by David Zeeman
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76.
September 19th,
2007
10:29 am
Mr. Krugman,
Thanks for addressing this subject, I look forward to reading your book. I hope that you heard Alan Greenspan on NPR (9/17 interview) begrudgingly say that he finds you to be a good economist.
Back to inequality: I remember during the 1988 presidential campaign, telling someone from the younger generation that there was a time when a whole family could live well n one income! I was mystified about Reagan’s popularity then, and his beatification 20 years later. Why is it that liberal commentators are so reluctant to balance comments about his policies by reminding us that that Reagan was responsible for the creation of homelessness in America?
Keep up your brilliant commentary.
— Posted by Sara S.
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77.
September 19th,
2007
10:34 am
This is more of a question than comment.
The other day, on public radio, I listened to a discussion: pros and cons, regarding Bloombergs proposal to help people and students in poverty, by paying poor people for various things: taking their children to doctors, attending a PTA meeting, students attending class, etc. Objections, of course, included: why should we pay people to do what they are supposed to be doing anyway.
My question is, what is the difference in paying these people to do these things, and paying CEO’s a large bonus in stock options to do what they are already paid to do?
Thank you very much. I love your colums.
— Posted by Cynthia Carlson
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78.
September 19th,
2007
10:35 am
Not that I disagree with your theory that the “wealthiest of the wealthy” have been taking advantage of every opportunity, and effectively destroying the toe-hold the middle class had when it came to wealth and power distribution following the New Deal, but don’t you think the boomers might also hold responsibility for the “great divergence” you have identified, following the 70s?
Looking back, it would seem all the drug-induced partying, and even the self-satisfied let-it-all-hang-out “protest” movements of the 60s and 70s, has amounted to very little sense of personal responsibility among the boomer middle class as they moved forward through the decades.
Having left behind the 60s and early 70s, boomers began a programme of caring only about “me and mine” that would eventually lead to an incredible obliviousness and apathy when it came to the damage their self-absorbtion was wreaking on the body politic and any sense of citizenship. Indeed the short-lived environmental movement of the late 80s, fueled by the fires of the next generation’s middle class youth, was quickly swallowed up in the boomer’s taste for SUVs, luxury living, and big-box-store convenience… and wasn’t it the boomer’s investment decisions, “family values” movement (which again centred on me-and-mine political and social solutions), and calls for tax cuts that helped to drive the stock market excesses of the past two decades and put the current movement conservative governments in power?
With their 401Ks rising and falling with tides of the stock market, questions about global competition, or the concerns of anti-powerty and anti-war groups(again fueled in large part by the ideals of the current generation of middle class youth)are poo pooed as deluded, and the term liberalism, itself, has become a perjorative that few among the generation who evolved in its hay-day want to claim.
Yes, the rich have taken advantage of the melt-down of the left. But they could not have done as much damage to democracy or the dreams of equality as they have, without the help of the booomers, whose political, economic and social decisions over the past 30 years have wreaked their own havoc on the well-being of the national body politic, the prospect of global stability, the possibility of an environmentally sustainable future.
— Posted by Gayle Irwin
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79.
September 19th,
2007
10:39 am
Thank you for your much-needed voice of reason. A measure we don’t hear as much about is the poorest 10% and how its share of total income has changed over time. How does that chart look? Also, I would love to hear your take on relative poverty. How have living standards of the bottom 10% improved in terms of indicators such as purchasing power and life expectancy? [I am not implying that rampant income inequality is acceptable, but I do think it’s curious that we tend to compare our poorest people to our wealthiest people, rather than to the poor in other countries.]
— Posted by Nina
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80.
September 19th,
2007
10:40 am
Future issues of your blog should address some key statistics to faciliate a meaningful discussion. Was the compression caused by the rich getting poorer or the non-rich getting wealthier? How much movement is there between the top 10% and the rest? Is it the same folks and their descendents or is it a changing group of people? Once appropriate statistics are set forth, you can then begin to analyze whether the relative gap is actually bad and, if so, should the focus be on wealth redistribution or how to increase the actual earning power and wealth of the bottom 90%? But first we need the facts.
— Posted by David Morse
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81.
September 19th,
2007
10:44 am
Your “Great Middle Class” was formed by the tacit military threat of troops returning from WWII who, with nothing left to do, gave significant pause to the corporate “one percenter” economy that saw its demise in violent social revolution if depression conditions extended after the worldwide victory of the Allies. Just as the draft of 1/3rd the work force into the armed services secured the bailout from the Great Depression, the GI Bill making it possible for ex-GIs to go to school stabilized the effect of the returning influx of new labor. The GI Bill prevalence also extended to inexpensive tuition that made higher education a near-entitlement. The demise of free tuition and the concommitant rise of the student loan “industry” led to your next stage.
— Posted by Rick Goranowski
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82.
September 19th,
2007
10:45 am
The middle-class society which Krugman grew up in was, he writes, “a society of broadly shared prosperity”. In his next paragraph he laments that “between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.” He clearly intends for these numbers to indicate that things are unfair.
But wait – this current middle class is enjoying a median income 13 percent greater than Krugman’s golden time of “broadly shared prosperity”. And, the poor – if their material goods can be taken as any indication — are infinitely better off than in the fifties.
As an artist whose year-to-year income has several times swung from being – according to our government’s definition – poor to wealthy and back, when I was “wealthy”, guess what I did with my wealth? I spent a great deal of it improving and maintaining my white-elephant of a house, and thereby helped provide a living for numerous carpenters, plumbers, painters, etc. It would greatly surprise me if that one-tenth-of-one-percent weren’t likewise spending much of their wealth and thus providing an income for a great many people further down the ladder. Perhaps this is what accounts for that thirteen percent increase in the median household income.
Regardless of how well we are doing, inevitably the Left wants more redistribution of wealth. In this they remind me of eager butchers, anxious to cleave open the goose and get directly at those golden eggs.
HP
— Posted by hugh prestwood
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83.
September 19th,
2007
10:56 am
Mr. Krugman, I’m looking forward to getting to read more of you on this blog!
What disturbs me more than anything in what you describe is the phenomenal set of circumstances that were required to allow the Great Compression to take place - a crippling depression, a strong and politically brilliant leader, mass organization, and a World War. There were people with the right ideas before then, but they were up against an overwhelming attitude of “that’s just the way things are.”
In reading your column, I thought about Polanyi’s classic “Great Transformation” about the creation of the market, and Mark Blyth’s “Great Transformations” about the creation of the great post-war compromise. Are we facing another, regressive transformation? Am I alone in noticing that while economic reformations geared towards equality and fairness are always advanced as humane policy, reformations towards laissez-faire markets is posed as being “the natural way?”
When can we get rid of this fallacy that every man for himself markets are natural, and social welfare is an artifrice?
— Posted by Dave Silverstone
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84.
September 19th,
2007
11:04 am
I’m looking forward to your book. I was born about ten years after you, and so I’ve experienced mostly the decline in our economic equality and civility. Indeed, the two seem to have come hand-in-hand; as if certain elements in our society stoked the fires of uncivil behavior as a distraction or justification for grabbing control over our national wealth.
Of course, none of that has anything to do with free market capitalism. In fact, so far as I can tell it’s the antithesis of the enlightened economics proposed by Adam Smith. But America as a whole seems mesmerized by the phrase “free market” to the point where we can’t challenge our current corrupted corporation-driven economy and government. The fact that people like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld, who largely have been failures at actually doing the jobs they have held, can rise to high office on a platform of “equality of opportunity” and “free market capitalism” only underscores the irony of our time.
I especially have grown tired of hearing about “creative destruction” and Riccardo’s “comparative advantage” as excuses for the ever increasing gap in wealth that you have shown. I can understand how an economy needs to “destroy” in order to “create”; and that the idea of comparative advantage follows logically from certain economic structures. But I find that both concepts actually lead to the conclusion that we need *more* progressive taxation, not less, to keep our economy vibrant; because the winners have to pay something back to the losers to keep the game going. Simply uttering those two phrases as a way of rationalizing why Wall Street traders and hedge fund managers—who don’t really create or build anything—are entitled to millions of dollars in compensation is disingenuous. I suspect that if people really understood how many so-called experts in the business media have sold out to a right wing propaganda machine, there would be more calls for reform.
So, I hope that you will help set the record straight on what free markets and capitalism really mean, either in your book or on this blog.
Good luck. We need more people who have the courage to say the emperor is naked.
— Posted by David Lentini
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85.
September 19th,
2007
11:06 am
Did the Great Compression come from the New Deal or from the economic expansion beginning on the eve of WWII because of increased government military spending? The % going to the top 10% still seems very high in 1939-1940, when the New Deal had been going on for six or seven years.
— Posted by Hal
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86.
September 19th,
2007
11:15 am
America has paid and will continue to pay a high price for the inequality. The steady decrease in government investment (aka funding and support), for programs, organizations and institutions that serve and promote the factors that contribute to economic equality will lead to a decrease in our power in the world.
Statistics have shown that an increase in the availabilty of audio/visual media such as cable tv stations, have paralled a decrease in voter participation at the voting both and other voter related activities. Bearing this in mind, the lack of populist outcry is not surprising. It must be noted that media ownership is set squarely among that 0.1% of the country’s richest population.
Education systems are training young people to pass tests and lessons in critical thinking and civic participation have fallen by the wayside.
This situation is exacerbated by a decrease in funding for education, housing, job development, training, health care, small business assistance and many of the programs that existed during the sixties and 70s, and during the time of FDR, for the purpose of supporting and expanding of the middle class.
Our congressional representatives and Senators are increasing among some of the wealthiest people in America.
With the focus on wealth and the wealthy, we are constantly losing great contributions of talent, ideas and skills that could be used in creating the “great society”. People are forced to spend their time on survival. America and the world suffers.
Congratulations on this blog. I have never felt compelled to write on any blog before. It is exciting and somewhat comforting to know that this type of discussion can be held in a widely read forum. Perhaps the discussions and ideas here will help to contribute to an environment of change. I will be e-mailing the link to the many I know who work to correct these inequalities every day of their lives.
— Posted by Celeste Morris
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87.
September 19th,
2007
11:25 am
There is an old saying that Democratic economic policies turn people into Republicans and then Republican economic policies turn people back into Democrats. The silver lining of the Reagan-Bush-Bush presidencies is that things seem to be coming full circle.
But, I would add a couple other observations. The period of the “Great Compression” for the most part was a period of modest federal deficits (other than during WWII), a world financial system tied to gold rather than the dollar, and little or no employer-based health coverage. The rise of inequality over the last 27 years has been accompanied by enormous increases in America’s trade and federal government debt, and an explosion in the cost of health care under our employer-based private insurance system. Our biggest national exports are now manufacturing jobs and debt instruments rather than physical product.
So, my question for the learned professor is: is all this inequality illusory, an accounting trick pulled off by the people who effectively hold the nation’s checkbook? Is there a way “we the People” can take that checkbook back? Can we force those who have effectively written a check to themselves from the bank of our shared wealth to pay back what they have stolen? Or would it just be another fiasco? Is cannibalism just a fact of life, no matter what group of humans is in charge?
Perhaps disciplines other than just economics are involved.
— Posted by Gary
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88.
September 19th,
2007
11:31 am
A very insightful column, but missing that last crucial component which has enabled The Great Divergence: apathy.
There is no ‘Grapes of Wrath’ outrage for misery so profound it couldn’t be ignored, nor masses of protesters on The Mall in Washington burning draft cards against an unjust war.
You have a population today which has been carefully engineered into believing this is the best of all times and that -my- individual problems are somehow -not- the norm… that -my- difficulties were somehow caused by some deficiency of -my- work ethic. There is a low-level, but universal hopelessness stalking America today that springs directly from an unresponsive government.
“I can’t change things, so why try? We elected a new Congress in November, but nothing is happening. 70% of us hate the war, but nothing is happening.”
We need a Peter Finch “Network” moment when enough people begin to say “I’m mad as hell and I won’t take it anymore.”
— Posted by dpkesling
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89.
September 19th,
2007
11:38 am
Like you, I think that the country is in for a major shift politically, but I am not at all certain that it is one that will be along traditional party fault lines. Red America longs for a populist just as much, if not more than does the Democratic Party. It is important to note in your chart that the Clinton Presidency did nothing to turn back the tide of income disparity. Quite the contrary. And I doubt that a Hillary Presidency would be any different. About the only Democrat who clarifies the lines between rich and poor is John Edwards, and he languishes far behind in the polls.
— Posted by Michael Day
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90.
September 19th,
2007
11:45 am
Interesting view, but you forget a few items. The people in the top 10% are not static. With the exception of a few families, Kennedy, Rockefeller, etc. there is considerable change in the composition of the top 10%. The majority got there by providing products or services that the rest of us voluntarily purchased, few if any “stole” their way to the top.
According to the Tax Foundation and Congressional Budget Office, the percent of all income earned by the top 1% fell from 17.8% to 16.3% while their share of taxes increased from 36.5% to 36.7%. The bottom 80% of income earners saw their share of taxes fall from 18.7% to 14.7%. From http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/2120.html
— Posted by Ron
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91.
September 19th,
2007
11:47 am
Fascinating. I’m curious as to whether this, the rise of inequality, is a global phenomenon? In the U.K., I suspect that the Thatcher government, breaking the consensus of the previous 40 years, paralleled the trends you display (thereby hamstringing New Labour).
— Posted by Peter Vince
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92.
September 19th,
2007
12:28 pm
Mr. Krugman: I am looking forward to future posts on this Blog. For the moment, I want only to put in a request that you help us simple minds out regarding some of the basic economic questions involved. For example, if wealth is created, then its distribution is not a zero-sum game. We cannot assume that if some have more wealth than others that injustice or unfairness are to blame. How can we spot the difference between economically and ethically legitimate inequality and economically and ethically illegitimate inequality? One last issue: the stock market. It seems to be a real creator of wealth for those who already have extra wealth to invest, and so a potential driver of inequality, but I am quite confused about its impact on the economy. As I understand it, most money invested in the stock market is purely speculative, it does not actually capitalize businesses after the Initial Public Offering, and, moreover, most businesses do not turn to Wall Street for capital, but rather only to cash out on shares of capital already created at a venture capital stage of the business. It would really help us economic neophytes who share many of your concerns if you were able shed light on such mysteries.
— Posted by Joe Pettit
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93.
September 19th,
2007
1:18 pm
What is it going to take to get the fact of “The Great Divergence” more widely known? Are there any honest conservative economists out there who recognize it? (And if they do, do they care?) Or do they use statistical smoke and mirrors to hide the fact?
— Posted by C. Duncan
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94.
September 19th,
2007
1:34 pm
Dear Paul,
I question your statement:
‘it (40’s - 80’s) was an era in which Democrats and Republicans agreed on basic values and could cooperate across party lines.
Don’t forget that Southern Democrats blocked basic civil liberties for African Americans for years during much of this period, and that it took civil upheaval to achieve some degree of social justice.
The 40’s, 50’s, 60’s were pretty good for white middle class Americans. You might get a different reading from other ethnic groups.
— Posted by Jeremy Teitelbaum
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95.
September 19th,
2007
1:36 pm
What a pity that the graph starts in 1917! I’d love to know what effect the introduction of the income tax in 1913 had.
— Posted by Jane
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96.
September 19th,
2007
2:09 pm
The great exception to your rosy picture is African-Americans, who in 1953 were kept down by a combination of legal and practical segregation. Although the problem of racism has by no means been solved, there exists today a black middle class that cannot be compared to the few blacks with money in the era in which we grew up.
I would like to see you address how the great reforms of the New Deal and post-war eras were compromised in order to win the votes of Southern Democrats. Example: wage and hour laws applied to factory workers (white) but not agricultural or domestic workers (black), increasing inequality between the races.
In my view, racism is one of the biggest exceptions to “the good old days.”
It would make an interesting sidebar.
— Posted by Deborah Leavy
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97.
September 19th,
2007
2:13 pm
According to your graph he golden age of the middle class began about 20 years after mass immigration was restricted in 1924, and ended about 20 years after it was re-instated in 1964. Only if labor is scarce can the upper classes be forced to pay for it.
— Posted by Robert Hume
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98.
September 19th,
2007
2:48 pm
Another correlation is union membership and income inequality. As union membership has declined, income inequality has increased. I’ve never understood why unions have been unable to organize the millions of cube dwellers (myself formerly included). There is a myth that once you achieve cube status, compensation is merit based. The harder I work, the bigger raise I’ll get. This is false. Compensation is always based on a matrix provided by the home office and a budget approved by the home office. Effort does not correlate to compensation. Meanwhile, benefits are cut, copays increased, and pension plans curtailed or eliminated. And still no effort to organize. Unbelievable.
— Posted by Dave Mendelin
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99.
September 19th,
2007
5:56 pm
Anyone wishing to read the paper from which PK pulled this inequality graph can find it here:
http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/pikettyqje.pdf
p.s. one cool thing about blogs is you can include links to the things you cite. Lets your readers make up their own minds.
— Posted by TO
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100.
September 19th,
2007
6:03 pm
I have two questions.
First, why is income inequality, in itself, a bad thing? The middle class is generally better off today than it was during the heyday that you describe.
Second, the end of “reign of the middle class”, according to your chart, coincides quite nicely with the the the stagflation of the late ’70s. Can we not blame the interventionist economic policies of the New Deal for that devestating economic period and the deregulation that followed for the subsequent growth of the economy?
— Posted by Mike in the Mountain West
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Saturday, September 21, 2007
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At State Dept., Blog Team Joins Muslim Debate
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Two Arab-Americans have been hired to post on blogs and Internet forums in an effort to improve America’s image.
Published: September 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/22/washington/22bloggers.html?_r=1&th=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&emc=th&adxnnlx=1190467838-p3x1HgPQcMSpx0C1RYK1zA
WASHINGTON — Walid Jawad was tired of all the chatter on Middle Eastern blogs and Internet forums in praise of gory attacks carried out by the “noble resistance” in Iraq.
So Mr. Jawad, one of two Arabic-speaking members of what the State Department called its Digital Outreach Team, posted his own question: Why was it that many in the Arab world quickly condemned civilian Palestinian deaths but were mute about the endless killing of women and children by suicide bombers in Iraq?
Among those who responded was a man named Radad, evidently a Sunni Muslim, who wrote that many of the dead in Iraq were just Shiites and describing them in derogatory terms. But others who answered Mr. Jawad said that they, too, wondered why only Palestinian dead were “martyrs.”
The discussion tacked back and forth for four days, one of many such conversations prompted by scores of postings the State Department has made on about 70 Web sites since it put its two Arab-American Web monitors to work last November.
The postings, are an effort to take a more casual, varied approach to improving America’s image in the Muslim world.
Brent E. Blaschke, the project director, said the idea was to reach “swing voters,” whom he described as the silent majority of Muslims who might sympathize with Al Qaeda yet be open to information about United States government policy and American values.
Some analysts question whether the blog team will survive beyond the tenure of Karen P. Hughes, the confidante of President Bush who runs public diplomacy. The department expects to add seven more team members within the next month — four more in Arabic, two in Farsi and one in Urdu, the official language of Pakistan.
The team concentrates on about a dozen mainstream Web sites such as chat rooms set up by the BBC and Al Jazeera or charismatic Muslim figures like Amr Khaled, as well as Arab news sites like Elaph.com. They choose them based on high traffic and a focus on United States policy, and they always identify themselves as being from the State Department.
They avoid radical sites, although team members said that jihadis scoured everywhere.
The State Department team members themselves said they thought they would be immediately flamed, or insulted and blocked from posting. But so far only the webmaster at the Islamic Falluja Forums (www.al-faloja.info) has revoked their password and told them to get lost, they said.
Not that they don’t attract plenty of skeptical, sarcastic responses. One man identifying himself as an Arab in Germany commented that they were trying to put lipstick on a pig. During Congressional testimony last week by Gen. David H. Petraeus, for example, the two-man team went into chat rooms to ask people their opinion.
“God bless America, the giving mother,” went one sarcastic response, going on to say that everything the United States does goes into “the balance of your pockets, I mean the balance of your rewards.” Another noted that Iraqis were better off before the invasion, while a third jokingly asked the Digital Outreach Team for a green card.
Mr. Jawad’s responses tend toward the earnest: “We do not deny that the situation in Iraq is difficult, but we are achieving success in decreasing the level of violence there with the contribution of the Iraqis who care about their nation and who reject the terrorists and killers who target their victims based on sect,” he wrote at one point. He directed the green card writer to the Web sites describing how to apply.
Mr. Jawad and his colleague, Muath al-Sufi, are circumspect about biographical details that would allow readers to pigeonhole them by their roots, religion or education. Mr. Jawad, would only say that he is in his 30s, was born in Texas and raised around the Arab world. Mr. Sufi also said he was in his 30s.
The team said certain topics repeated regularly, including arguments over the accusations that American soldiers tortured Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and President Bush’s comment that the fight against terrorism is a “crusade.” Much time is also spent trying to douse the Internet brush fires that erupt whenever prominent Americans from talk-show hosts to politicians make anti-Muslim remarks of the “bomb Mecca” variety.
Each response is carefully shaped in English by the team and translated into often poetic Arabic.
“We try to put ourselves in the mindset of someone receiving the message,” said Duncan MacInnes, the director of the Counterterrorism Communication Center, of which the Digital Outreach Team is one branch. “Freedom for an Arab doesn’t necessarily have the same meaning it has for an American. Honor does. So we might say terrorism is dishonorable, which resonates more.”
Analysts said they had been surprised by the positive response, with people seemingly eager to engage, although the overall impact was impossible to assess. “They are not carrying the slogans of liberalization or democratization across the region,” said Adel al-Toraifi, a Saudi political analyst. “They are talking about peace and dialogue, and I think that makes it difficult for those debating them to justify criticizing them.”
Mr. Toraifi said the postings had generated some debate in the Arab world and had been the subject of a column in an Algerian newspaper lauding the State Department for discussing policy with ordinary people, something the writer said the Algerian government would never do.
Indeed, several analysts said having State Department employees on the Web helps to counter one source of radicalization — the sense that Washington is too arrogant to listen to the grievances of ordinary Arabs, so violence is the sole means to attract attention.
Mr. Jawad and Mr. Sufi say that in their roughly two dozen weekly postings they avoid all religious discussions, like whether jihad that kills civilians is legitimate. They even steer clear of arguments, instead posting straightforward snapshots of United States policy.
Mr. Jawad is often maligned as a “U.S. agent,” including by Radad, the man of the “just Shiites” remark. After Mr. Jawad wrote that all life was equally worth preserving, part of the man’s response was, “Don’t you think an agent of Arab nationality deserves to be killed?”
Mr. Jawad wrote back in part, “It seems to me that many people are quick to offer judgments based on political views so those who oppose them are always agents and infidels. Which leads to law of the jungle, which is not just, but chaotic.”
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COLORIZING Do movie posters do much to fill theater seats? Armin Vit, a graphic designer, believes they may. Many of the top films have had dark-hued posters. It is, he wrote on Under Consideration, a Web site for graphic designers, “telling that black is the color of choice in movie posters.” In his review of posters for popular films, the only exceptions were G-rated films (underconsideration.com).
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Smashing Posters
By STEVEN HELLER
Published: December 5, 2004
The vibrating colors and illegible typographic lettering of psychedelic concert posters in the late 60's gave us a universal graphic language for the hippie sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll era. Posters were designed to advertise bands, appeal to aficionados and offend everyone else. Hip-capitalist entrepreneurs, however, quickly reduced real psychedelia to a youth-culture style that sold everything from tie-dyed neckties to Volkswagen vans. The coffin was nailed when psychedelic lettering popped up on TV in the logo for ''The Dating Game.'' An era was over. What came next, in the 70's, was punk music -- and an anarchic graphic sensibility typified by D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself), a deliberately clumsy hodgepodge of images that were cut and pasted and frequently stolen and photocopied. Punk was known for its ransom-note aesthetic, introduced by Jamie Reid on his record sleeves for the Sex Pistols; this stuff broke the tenets of legibility but telegraphed clear-coded messages to its audience. In the years since, rock posters have come to embrace a wide range of raucous comic styles and typographies -- as well as frequent parodying of, and homages to, passe fashions (including psychedelics) -- intended to convey moods and make statements that are often satirically political.
The most important reason for the popularity of what are now called ''gig posters,'' according to Paul Grushkin and Dennis King in their lavish new book, ART OF MODERN ROCK: The Poster Explosion (Chronicle, $60; after Feb. 28, $75), has been the flourishing of indie music and the extinction of the old-fashioned album cover. With the introduction of compact discs in the 80's, which shrank cover art to small squares -- and now with the increase in downloadable computer files, which eliminate the need for covers altogether -- posters not only advertise but logo-ize the artists. They are, moreover, complementary artistic experiences that make the music visually concrete and send other messages. Since posters are more displayable than CD's and are highly collectible, they serve both as mnemonics for the bands and as emblems of fan loyalty. Thus, a subculture of idiosyncratic poster studios and artists, including Frank Kozik, Art Chantry, Yee Haw Industries and Digital Toolbox, is about as well known among certain fans as are Wilco, Pearl Jam, Tom Waits, Marilyn Manson and other subjects of their work.
Grushkin and King suggest that many of these posters are not as ephemeral as the paper they're printed on. While some are spat out of the computer as laser prints, a good number are done as durable silk-screens of museum quality. Thanks to the Internet, old and new posters are available in downloadable files on interactive sites like gigposters.com, where posters, artists and music are hotly critiqued. This book contains some 1,800 posters; not all of them represent the highest levels of concept or craft, but one thing is certain -- few are subtle. With bold color, expressionist drawing, strident collage and ghoulish rendering of the sacred and the profane, these posters are designed to grab attention and kick out the jams.
A poster from ''Art of Modern Rock'': ''Que Dios Nos Perdone,'' by Frank Kozik, 1988
A poster from ''Art of Modern Rock'': ''Sub Pop Ultra Lame Fest,'' also by Kozik, 1992.
A poster from ''Art of Modern Rock'': ''Belly Up,'' by Scrujo, 2002
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Posters From the Edge
By CHRISTINE MUHLKE
Published: October 10, 2004
Before you call Keith Knight, you'll need the movie poster that says ''You, You, You.'' Posteritati, a shop east of SoHo (go to www.posteritati.com), is the place to start. With more than 12,000 original posters, it's where a music-video director can express himself with a 1957 Polish ''Godzilla'' poster; the ingenue can find a kitschy Japanese affiche for ''Bedazzled'' featuring Raquel Welch; or a sci-fi animator can choose a Romanian ad for ''Beneath the Planet of the Apes.''''Directors, executives and actors come here for wrap gifts and starting-production gifts,'' says the owner, Sam Sarowitz. ''Then there are the serious collectors,'' like Martin Scorsese. (And then there are those who would pay $35,000 for an Argentine ''King Kong'' original.) Until Nov. 7, the shop will run the exhibition ''Rebels, Rockers and Renegades: Movie Posters of the American New Wave''; in May, Posteritati's art will appear in ''The Independent Movie Poster Book'' (Abrams) for those who lack wall space. For those who don't, the shop offers custom framing.
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Pop Art But in 3-D And Hot
By HILARY S. WOLFSON
Published: January 26, 2003
CHARLES FAZZINO'S vibrant 3-D serigraphs teem with tiny, whimsically rendered people -- sitting in stadium bleachers, walking down a New York City street, skiing down a mountain, so meticulously drawn that you can taste the relish on the hot dogs, hear the car horns and feel the powdery snow.
Mr. Fazzino, born in 1955, is not embarrassed to be a commercial -- and commercially successful -- artist. He's quick to mention the celebrities who own his work. (Rosie O'Donnell, Phil Collins and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, to name three.) His art has been shown in more than 600 galleries in 20 countries. He lives in Pelham Manor and has a studio and publishing company, Museum Editions Ltd., in New Rochelle. The son of a sculptor and a shoe designer, he studied art at the New York School of Visual Arts -- but he started selling his work when he was 15.
This weekend he will be in San Diego for Super Bowl XXXVII, signing the commemorative poster he made for the game.
Q. How did your involvement with the National Football League come about?
A. I've been a National Football League artist for five years and have done the posters for the Super Bowl for three years. It all started with my favorite teams, the Jets and the Giants. They asked me to do commemoratives for them because that is what I had been doing for the past 10 years -- commemorate special events or places, whether it be New York City or a Lower East Side deli. After that a lot of different galleries from different states who saw the pieces asked me to do commemoratives for their teams. A gallery in Cleveland wanted me to do the Cleveland Browns. The same thing with Miami, Denver and San Francisco. Wherever I had galleries, people asked me to do special commemorative editions for their customers.
Q. When did audiences start discovering your work?
A. People got a taste of what I do more than 20 years ago at the Washington Square outdoor art shows that ran every year. I just got started doing my dimensional pieces, had made about 20 of them, and hung them up at this art show on the street. People passed by and commented: ''Ooh, I love these little dimensional things. How much is it?'' I told them it was $100 framed. Well, I sold all 20 pieces in the first four hours. I went from doing inexpensive prints using aquarium sealant to the fine art quality, expensive silkscreen editions with handmade papers that I do today.
Q. How would you define your work?
A. If I had to compare my pop art with anyone else's, I suppose you could say it's a cross between maybe Andy Warhol and Red Grooms. I'd like to think my work is essentially Charles Fazzino.
Q. How about those people that say your pop art is O.K. for galleries but not for fine art museums?
A. I've said to many people that when Andy Warhol and Red Grooms started, they were laughed at. Norman Rockwell aspired to be in museums and now he is, of course, years after his death. I think it's the way the art world has viewed whimsical pop art in the past. It just hasn't been taken seriously.
Q. You've been doing more religious pieces lately. Where did that come from?
A. It came from going to all of the Lower East Side delis, like Katz's Deli and all the others that dot 23rd Street. I started doing drawings and some early editions of my favorite delis. People loved them. Then I started painting the street synagogues and the art galleries would ask, did you ever think about doing something just on Hanukkah and other Jewish holidays?
Q. How did you get involved with doing pieces for charities?
A. I started out doing artwork for a local charity here in Westchester called Project Child. I was honored when they asked me if they could use my work to raise money for their charity.
Q. Word has it that your daughter Heather is getting some buzz in the art world herself.
A. Yes, it's great. She's 12 years old and has done sell-out art shows for Art Expo since she was 7. She sells to art galleries that don't even collect my work. She doesn't do 3-D though. She has her own style.
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NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: NEW YORK UP CLOSE; Politically Charged Graffiti Treats Spears as a Symptom, Not a Star
By MAURA KELLY
Published: December 9, 2001
It's the rare subway poster that escapes unwanted ink. So most New Yorkers might not have looked twice at the graffiti scrawled on posters advertising the HBO broadcast of Britney Spears's Nov. 18 concert in Las Vegas, featuring the performer encased in a skintight rhinestone jumpsuit.
But Stephen Hoban, 25, an editorial assistant at the Guggenheim Museum who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was struck by that in addition to standard-fare beards and predictable off-color comments, the posters were defaced with messages that were surprisingly political.
''Britney Spears is everything that is wrong with America,'' one scribbler wrote. Another gave Ms. Spears a Hitler mustache and added the words: ''I did it. Not Osama. Blame me.'' About 20 posters included drawings of muzzles over her mouth, along with messages like ''Disney/Viacom/Pepsi . . . It's Over . . . America's Whore'' that seemed to fault Western capitalism, as represented by the performer, for America's current problems.
In response, Mr. Hoban and his roommate, Will Becton, 25, a video editor and improvisational comic, used a digital camera to photograph more than 100 images of defaced Spears posters in the five boroughs.
''I was struck by the violence of some of the comments,'' Mr. Hoban said. ''And we thought it would make a visually arresting project. Our original plan was to collect 25 or 30 images -- we were hoping there'd be at least that many -- and arrange them in a grid, so we could print them up for friends. But then we just kept finding more posters, and the significance of the whole phenomenon started to dawn on us.''
Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, suggested two theories on why Ms. Spears, who performed in New York most recently on Wednesday at Madison Square Garden, became a political target.
''The terrorists were not attacking only the building they hit, but American culture in general, its promiscuity, its wanton commercialism,'' Professor Thompson said. ''And Britney Spears is a perfect metaphor for all that.''
Timing may have also mattered. ''When the posters first came out, the World Trade Center site was still on fire and most of the bodies hadn't been recovered,'' he said. ''Advertising such frivolous entertainment then seemed so tasteless that I think a lot of people unloaded on Britney without figuring out what they were really angry about.''
That New York had more than 2,000 Spears posters, more than any other city, not to mention a 24-hour subway system, made it especially easy for the scribblers to present their messages.
Most of the posters are gone now, although the two photographers have preserved 15 of their images on a Web site, mrbellersneighborhood.com.
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7 OTHER WONDERS CIO magazine presents a look at the “Seven Wonders of the I.T. World,” which are “the biggest, most extreme and most unusual computers and projects.” They include the fastest supercomputer (IBM Blue Gene), the “most intriguing data center (Google’s “ultramysterious” facility in The Dalles, Ore.) and the computer farthest from Earth (NASA’s Voyager I satellite) (cio.com).
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ONLINE SHOPPER; (Old) Poster, Poster, Come Grace My Wall
By MICHELLE SLATALLA
Published: June 7, 2001
ONE of my nicest birthday presents ever was a bright red cow wearing earrings.
Although the cow is technically a drawing on an enormous vintage advertising poster in the living room, my daughters no longer remember that he is a two-dimensional rendering or that his original purpose was to sell French cheese (hence the dangling earrings shaped like containers of Laughing Cow cheese). They speak of him in the same tone they use to discuss the antics in the back of the school bus: ''I walked by the cow, and he seemed pretty happy for someone who has to hang, like, right above those stinky sneakers you kicked off.''
Given that level of affection, I felt confident that my family would back up a plan I hatched recently to get a second poster for an empty wall in the kitchen. I wanted a bold image, something to taunt the white plainness of the GE Profile refrigerator. It's no secret a certain appliance and I have not been on speaking terms since the last ice maker breakdown.
Buying online seemed an obvious solution since hundreds of dealers have posted lots of small images of vintage posters promoting subjects like travel, the circus and even ''Wholesome Nutritious Foods From Corn'' -- that one's in the International Poster Gallery site's PosterFinder database of more than 3,000 posters, priced from $100 to $20,000 (www.internationalposter.com).
But I worried that I didn't have the needed expertise and might unknowingly buying one of the many reproductions, reissues or even downright fakes that dealers say are common in the vintage poster market.
I didn't have that problem a few years ago when my husband and I bought the cow, mainly because easy Internet access to thousands of posters didn't exist. Instead, we spent two hours at the Park South Gallery in Manhattan examining posters that were spread out like Persian rugs. By the time we left, our brains were stuffed with facts. I knew that the vivid, luminous colors of older posters were the result of a three-stone lithography process in wide use from the 1880's to the 1930's. I knew that prices fluctuated widely, from less than $100 for small anonymous pieces to the $220,000 that a bidder paid at auction in 1989 for Toulouse-Lautrec's ''Moulin Rouge.'' And I had learned that an amateur like me had no hope of accurately appraising a poster based on rarity and condition.
On the other hand, shoppers have a better selection online these days. Within an hour of online browsing, I had visited a Swiss gallery at www.gal-123.com, a Canadian gallery at www.idesirevintageposters.com and a French gallery at www.affiche-francaise.com. I lost count of how many times I'd seen certain famous images -- like Leonetto Cappiello's ''Maurin Quina,'' depicting a wine-loving green devil -- and which were truly rare.
To ensure that I would be dealing with reputable dealers, I visited the International Vintage Poster Dealers Association's site (www.IVPDA.com); its members have agreed to adhere to ''strict guidelines to ensure the authenticity of the posters they offer for sale and to promote ethical and fair business practices.'' The site linked to the Web sites of many of its more than 50 members.
But while the Internet makes it incredibly easy to do comparison shopping, it also makes it impossible to see any creases, discolorations or tears. It also robs the posters of life -- there's no way to reproduce the true colors, which are distorted first by a digital camera, then by the host's computer and your own. Wondering how to proceed, I phoned Laura Gold, co-owner of the Park South Gallery, and asked for advice.
''Always, always get on the phone with the dealer before you buy,'' Ms. Gold said. That rules out any dealer who doesn't post a phone number on a site. ''And,'' she added, ''ask a lot of questions.''
''O.K.,'' I said, ''Why have I seen so many green devils?''
''The green devil was original in 1906,'' Ms. Gold explained, ''but the company that owns the poster has the right to reprint it. It's an original, but it may have been printed in the 1930's, the 1960's, the 1970's. The colors in the older one are duller.''
Instead of comforting me, that informative answer terrified me, making me realize how little I know about posters. Maybe that's why I got sidetracked by a Cappiello oil painting called ''Le Chef'' on Ms. Gold's site, www.parksouthgallery.com. The painting depicts a cheery cook chasing terrified pigs with a huge knife. It would convey my sentiments to the refrigerator, which has been making funny noises again lately.
Then I learned that the 1930 painting, which was 74 inches wide and 46 1/2 inches tall, cost $16,000.
Clearly it was too big.
So I visited the International Vintage Poster Fair (www.Posterfair.com), a site that presents merchandise from dozens of dealers. That site pointed me to Vintage Poster Art International at www.vintageposterart
.com, operated by Michael Cipollaro, a dealer in Florida. There I saw a poster I liked, circa 1920, that showed a fuzzy brown bee in a field of flowers. I think the original idea had been to sell French honey.
The poster was $475, so it clearly was the right size.
But there was another problem. When I asked Ms. Gold if she was familiar with that poster, she said, ''No, who is the artist?''
''Anonymous,'' I said.
She sighed. Then she warned me that such posters are harder to authenticate.
It's also harder to determine comparable prices for anonymous posters. I learned that when I searched icollector's Art Price Guide (at www.Icollector.com), which has sales records of more than a million artworks auctioned from 1987 to 1997. Although you can search by artist, title, medium, price, sale date or auction house, it's easiest to find information on works by known artists. There was nothing on the bee.
But e-mail and a phone call to Mr. Cipollaro convinced me that it was worth taking a chance. Yes, he would give me a full refund if I didn't like the poster; yes, he accepted credit cards (which provides buyers added protection in case of a dispute); yes, the colors were vibrant.
''Most people learn that the poster in person is nicer than the poster on the site,'' Mr. Cipollaro said. ''The only time someone sends one back is when they say, 'I was looking for a more orange color.' ''
So I ordered the bee. When it arrived, I eagerly ripped open the long cardboard tube, unrolled the poster -- and hated it. Up close, the bee looked menacing, not friendly. And the colors that had looked subtle in the online image were a harsh, comic-book palette of bright blue, green and orange. This couldn't hang in my kitchen. So I sent it back.
Round One goes to the refrigerator.
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ART/ARCHITECTURE; Like His Posters, Available Again, A Designer Endures
By RITA REIF
Published: May 6, 2001
MILTON GLASER'S 1966 portrait of Bob Dylan -- the face in profile, blackened and looking down, the hair a color-pulsing mop of wavy ropes -- has been hailed as the ultimate expression of the psychedelic style in an American poster.
But the inspiration for it was far removed from the United States of the 60's. Mr. Glaser based his Dylan on a self-portrait by Marcel Duchamp, created as a cutout silhouette in Paris in the 50's; the swirling hair, he said, was taken from ''the curvilinear generosity and jewel-like colors of the Islamic style in centuries past.''
Whatever its origins, the Dylan poster was a huge success: six million copies were distributed with Mr. Dylan's ''Greatest Hits'' album of 1966.
''It was a new use of the poster -- a giveaway that was supposed to encourage people to buy the album,'' Mr. Glaser said. ''Then it took on a life of its own, showing up in films, magazines, whatever. It did not die, as such forms of ephemera usually do.''
Instead, the Dylan poster ''remains one of my most iconic works,'' Mr. Glaser writes in his new book, ''Art Is Work,'' published recently by Overlook Press ($85). ''I have mixed feelings about this. I don't like to be entirely identified with a moment that has clearly passed, with the inevitable suggestion that I have as well.''
No fear. Mr. Glaser, at 71, has never been identified with any one art movement of the last 50 years. His career has been marked by change since 1954, when he and Seymour Chwast, Edward Sorel and Reynold Ruffins founded Push Pin Studios, a graphics firm with Mr. Glaser as president. (He left it 20 years later.) The Dylan portrait, his third poster, was close in spirit to his first, a subway poster of a Beatles-like group from 1964 that depicted four young men singing and strumming in vividly colored jagged images. (It was used as a promotion by the New York radio station WOR-FM.)
''Art Is Work'' shows how Mr. Glaser has retained his flat imagery as well as his wit and intensity throughout his career, whether expressing the simplest or the most complex messages in posters, record albums, book covers and magazine illustrations. (He was a co-founder and designer of New York magazine.) The posters he did of pop, rock, country and gospel artists -- Mick Jagger, Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Presley and Jerry Garcia -- were often the most visible manifestations of his style as he moved from Pop Art and psychedelic representations to greater naturalism, incorporating softer, richer drawings, toned-down colors and expressionistic imagery.
Today, at a time when posters have been upstaged by computer graphics, the original Dylan poster, long out of print, is still selling as a reproduction, which is available on Mr. Glaser's Web site (www.miltonglaserposters.com) at $50. It is the only poster of the 400 he designed that has been reissued as a reproduction. Seven years ago, he allowed a paper company to reproduce the poster for a design show as a giveaway to young designers, most of whom had never seen the 1966 Dylan album.
Mr. Glaser began selling posters himself, including the Dylan reproductions, late last year. Several hundred thousand originals of his other posters had been accumulating and almost forgotten in the basement of his Manhattan studio, he said. He selected 50 posters to sell for $100 each, or $200 if signed. Several rarities, like a 1983 Hudson Valley Summer Festival poster, range from $300 to $400 each and $100 more if signed. The only poster Mr. Glaser will not sign is the Dylan reproduction, because it is not from the original printing.
Poster sales thrive on the Internet even though ''there's no big market today for commissioning contemporary posters,'' Mr. Glaser said.
''They are no longer considered an essential tool of communication,'' he added, ''but are bought as art works or items of nostalgia.''
Even his smaller graphics are selling, including handbills, bumper stickers and T-shirts bearing his famous 1975 design for the New York State slogan ''I Love New York,'' in which he used a big, red heart. ''Every single piece of printed ephemera today is a collectible,'' he said.
Curiously, Mr. Glaser designed more posters last year -- 20 in all, 12 of which were for the Teatro Massimo, the opera house in Palermo, Italy -- than he had since his peak period, in the 70's and 80's.
His favorite poster from last year's crop used an eerie depiction of Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, which Mr. Glaser initially produced for Time magazine just after Garcia died in 1995. The face is faintly drawn and yellowing, and framed by a cloud of white hair and beard.
''It shows Garcia fading from memory, even though his music will live on,'' Mr. Glaser said. When Time rejected the drawing, he sent it to Rolling Stone, which published it.
Mr. Glaser chose the Garcia portrait as the central image of a poster he designed for a retrospective of his work last November at the American Institute of Graphic Arts in Manhattan. The poster is a metaphor for his own experience, Mr. Glaser said. ''You have a moment when you're in the world,'' he said, ''and then you're lucky if your work endures.''
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Antiques; Ephemera That Still Work Magic
By WENDY MOONAN
Published: October 24, 1997
''A poster has got to be able to make you see, do and feel -- all in a second,'' says Richard Barclay, one of the authors of the new book ''Collecting Prints and Posters'' (Reed International, London). Mr. Barclay should know: he has been a poster consultant to Christie's in London for 11 years. He is currently in Manhattan, readying the 221 lots in Christie's first New York sale devoted entirely to 19th and 20th-century posters, scheduled for Dec. 10 at Christie's East.
Interest in vintage posters -- that is, posters at least 25 years old -- is growing, with more dealers, more sale venues and more museum exhibitions than ever. This weekend, the 18th International Vintage Poster Fair will make its semiannual appearance at the Metropolitan Pavilion at 110 West 19th Street in Chelsea, with 34 dealers from England, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland and the United States. (The $30 preview tonight is from 5 to 9 P.M; admission is $10 tomorrow, 10 A.M. to 7 P.M., and on Sunday, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Information: 212-206-0499).
On Oct. 16, the Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami Beach opened ''Pioneers of Modern Graphic Design,'' an exhibition of 70 posters, books and objects from the Wolfsonian collection, with designs reflecting the British Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism and the Bauhaus. It is sponsored by Continental Airlines and Bottega Veneta and runs through April.
Ever since the 1860's, when the French began to make lithographic posters, they have been designed to announce, promote and sell, whether it be a concert, a brand of liqueur or a stylish resort. Posters had to catch the attention of the passerby and communicate instantly. In fact, the first great poster artist, the painter Jules Cheret of Paris, known for his popular bright orange, blue and green music hall posters, got his initial inspiration from recruiting posters for the American Civil War -- broadsides promoting participation.
Cheret realized a poster did not have to show product; it merely had to produce ''a reaction of amusement, curiosity, excitement or some positive feeling which will help make the right points,'' as Harold Hutchinson writes in ''The Poster: An Illustrated History From 1860'' (Viking). Mr. Hutchinson notes that by 1880 Cheret was so good at his craft, a Paris art critic wrote that ''there was a thousand times more talent in the smallest of Cheret's posters than in the majority of the pictures on the walls of the Paris Salon.''
A century ago, Mr. Barclay said, ''every wall in Paris was rented out for posters, so the Government had to pass a law restricting bill posting to specific areas.'' The French set the trends, but the Germans and Swiss soon made their own form of poster art, and were then followed by the Belgians, the English and, finally, the Americans, who excelled at circus posters in particular.
People began collecting posters right from the start -- and not just because they were inexpensive or beautiful. Marianne Lamonaca, curator of the Wolfsonian show, argues that the adherents of Art Nouveau, Futurism and Russian Constructivism were consciously ''undercutting high culture and proclaiming an egalitarianism of the arts.
''The artists wanted to create art that would earn a response from the people,'' she said. ''They didn't want to be elitist. They wanted to disseminate ideas about art and culture that people could afford.''
She quotes a 1912 declaration from the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire: ''Catalogues, posters, advertisements of all sorts. Believe me, they contain the poetry of our epoch.''
Ms. Lamonaca said posters ''made claims on the public imagination in a way that the traditional visual arts did not, and stood as emblems of progress, comfort and affluence.'' The Wolfsonian show includes a 1934 Bruno Munari poster in green, white and red, the colors of Italy's flag, that promotes the machine as the means to bring industrially underdeveloped Italy into the 20th century.
The exhibition also has war posters, another collecting specialty. One that Edward McKnight Kauffer designed for the United States Government after the outbreak of World War II, ''The New Order of the Axis,'' portrays a menacing, demonic man resembling Mussolini who is wearing a swastika on a ribbon around his neck.
Vintage posters ''attract all sorts of people, and people want them for different reasons,'' Mr. Barclay said. ''There are ski people and golf people -- these posters are more expensive because it's a rich man's sport -- Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Jugendstil collectors. Posters attract people across the board, and across the pocketbook.'' He points out that a very good Toulouse-Lautrec poster might cost $20,000 -- a fraction of what a painting by the artist would be.
Vintage posters can cost a few hundred dollars, but the ones that appeal to collectors tend to fall into three price categories. The first group, in the $1,000 to $5,000 range, includes good posters that may not be particularly rare or in good condition. (Condition is crucial if one is seriously investing and plans to trade up later.) The second group, from $10,000 to $20,000, includes those by well-known artists like Alphonse Mucha or Toulouse-Lautrec, or popular subjects like the French train poster ''Etoile du Nord.'' The third group, selling up to $100,000, is made up of unique or special posters.
Mr. Barclay recalled that a poster by the Viennese Secessionist Kolo Moser sold for $109,000 in 1982, while a poster Man Ray designed for the London Underground sold for $40,000 in 1993.
Work by the Italian-born artist Leonetto Cappiello, who was active in Paris during the early 20th century, is one of the hot collectibles of the last year or so, according to people like Mark Weinbaum, a private dealer in Manhattan, and Louis Bixenman, the owner of the gallery Poster America in Chelsea.
Cappiello posters, which sell for under $4,000, feature bold, simple images, like a horse and rider against a solid, brightly colored background. The products being advertised -- chocolates, aperitifs, Champagnes -- are not related to the image.
Mr. Weinbaum advised novice collectors to buy ''whatever their instincts point to -- whether it's a subject, a shape, or a political movement.'' Posters, he said, ''are an area of real personal involvement: buy something you really like.''
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Blogs and Posters
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Sunday, September 22, 2007
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My art spells out the distinctions between life and art, reality and fantasy, truth and fiction. It operates somewhere in the territory of Duchamp and Warhol, but often with quite different intentions and a fascination with a very specific down-and-dirty vision of American popular culture that will now climb the Guggenheim spiral: biker girls, naughty nurses, hippies, pulp fiction, cartoons, borscht-belt humor, Marlboro men and muscle cars.
In some ways the car can be seen simply as an extension of Mr. Prince’s obsessions as a prodigious collector of Americana, from first editions of Kerouac, Mario Puzo and many others to manuscripts, photos, pulp fiction, comics and magazines. It might also be viewed as an extension of the practice that first brought Mr. Prince to prominence in the art world: his photographs of existing photographs, most of them taken from ads for luxury goods and from the epic, cowboy scenes in Marlboro ads. The pictures emerged at a time when artists like Mr. Prince, Sherrie Levine, Jack Goldstein and Cindy Sherman were first starting to use the camera to dig deep into the late 20th century’s collective image bank, questioning what they found there and asking what it meant about how we saw ourselves.
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Haneke has his own theory for the divergent routes taken by Hollywood and Europe, one in which, perhaps not surprisingly, the darker side of German and Austrian history plays a central role. “At the beginning of the 20th century,” he told me, “when film began in Europe, storytelling of the kind still popular in Hollywood was every bit as popular here. Then the Nazis came, and the intellectuals — a great number of whom were Jewish — were either murdered or managed to escape to America and elsewhere. There were no intellectuals anymore — most of them were dead. Those who escaped to America were able to continue the storytelling approach to film — really a 19th-century tradition — with a clear conscience, since it hadn’t been tainted by fascism. But in the German-speaking world, and in most of the rest of Europe, that type of straightforward storytelling, which the Nazis had made such good use of, came to be viewed with distrust. The danger hidden in storytelling became clear — how easy it was to manipulate the crowd. As a result, film, and especially literature, began to examine itself. Storytelling, with all the tricks and ruses it requires, became gradually suspect. This was not the case in Hollywood.” At this point, Haneke asked politely whether I was following him, and I told him that I was. “I’m glad,” he said, apparently with genuine relief. “For Americans, this can sometimes be hard to accept.”
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