The effort to conscientiously focus on good news is a mental discipline which will reward the person who practices it. Charles Calomiris reported the following in December 2022 in the Wall Street Journal:
The percentage of people living in poverty fell from 32% in 1947 to 15% in 1967 to only 1.1% in 2017. Opportunities created by economic growth, and government-sponsored social programs funded by that growth, produced broadly shared prosperity: 94% of households in 2017 would have been at least as well off as the top quintile in 1967. Bottom-quintile households enjoy the same living standards as middle-quintile households, and on a per capita basis the bottom quintile has a 3% higher income. Top-quintile households receive income equal to roughly four times the bottom (and only 2.2 times the lowest on a per capita basis), not the 16.7 proportion popularly reported.
“Real income of the bottom quintile,” Calomiris adds, “grew more than 681% from 1967 to 2017.” He concludes: “Average living standards have improved dramatically.”
If these data seem unfamiliar, it is because of that principle which dictates that the media, left unchecked, tend to focus on bad news. The reader who is regularly exposed to the typical news media will have been so bombarded with negative reports that good news will seem counterintuitive.
Readers may even have developed an automatic skepticism about any good news. Yet pleasant developments do, in reality, take place.
What does this all mean? That in the United States, wage-earners in all categories have experienced increases in their standards of living, and that those in the lowest categories are catching up to the middle and upper classes.
While there is a form of income inequality, if one measures pre-tax earned income, the situation looks quite different if one measures post-tax income from all sources: this is because those earning larger incomes pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes, and those earning smaller incomes receive a larger share of unearned income.
Calomiris continues:
The equality of consumption between the bottom quintile (in which only 36% of prime-age persons work) and the middle quintile (in which 92% of prime-age persons work) is a striking finding.
The savvy reader will be aware of the news media’s tendency to amplify or invent some types of problems. Worth noting is also a tendency to downplay or ignore types of problems.
