When We Can No Longer Relate: Creating Characters in an Age of Growing Economic Inequality

I was just reading a short story from Margaret Atwood's collection Moral Disorder titled "The Art of Cooking and Serving." To say the story was beautifully written is redundant; it was written by Margaret Atwood. In this particular story, an eleven year old tosses off a casual complaint about the fact that her parents' cabin doesn't have a refrigerator or a boat for water-skiing. It's not central to the story, but the detail suddenly kicked me out of the narrative and got me thinking about characterization and class. I expect that I am supposed to feel warmly toward the story's protagonist, but this small detail immediately makes me resent her. Her family can afford a second house but she complains about the amenities? I can barely afford one home which is far too cramped for my family, but we can't figure out how to get out from under it and into something more suitable. As an adult, I'm acutely aware that I am lower-middle class in my country (and very wealthy in relation to the majority of the people in the world). I don't think Atwood wanted me to resent the character (an 11 year-old, after all), but my class status makes this difficult. While I'm consciously aware that her childish reaction to the cabin is entirely realistic and understandable, and I can't reasonably expect an 11 year-old to count her blessings against the circumstances of others, I just have trouble relating to her. This one detail has made her feel distant. Not so much that I can't find other ways to connect to her and like her, but more than any single, small detail should affect my relationship to a character.  And, as a writer, that has me worried.  Not too long ago, Americans weren't even allowed to talk about class. The only people who spoke openly about it were the absolute dregs of our society; communists, artists, and academics. To even mention it, we were told, was to try to incite "class warfare." The forbidden nature of the subject didn't change the amount of money in anyone's bank accounts, but it did maintain the illusion of a cultural homogeneity longer than it would have lasted otherwise. At some point, the numbers told a story that all but the most ideological and willfully obtuse could not deny: The rich are getting dramatically richer. The poor are getting relatively poorer. The middle-class is thinning and fraying, like a rope pulled too tightly. There will come a point at which we have two distinct classes in America. There will come a point, at some unspecified time after that, when we acknowledge that fact. When it comes to social policy, I think it's all to the good that we are recognizing this change. Of course, it doesn't mean we can agree on solutions or even on whether it's a real problem. In our political climate, everyone has gone to their corners, of course. There's lots of talk about income inequality, and people are starting to talk openly about capital inequality now, too, though that's still pretty wonky. I could blather on it about it all day, but I won't. Rather than put forth policy proposals about changes to the tax code, as exciting as that would be for everyone, I think it's worthwhile for writers to consider what this will mean for us as we create characters.

Once upon a time, people calmly accepted the fact that their societies were composed of haves and have-nots. In literature's ancient past, the characters were almost all haves; heroic warriors who were also kings, beautiful maidens who were also queens or princesses. When peasants were depicted at all, it was because they were on their way to becoming haves through pluck or twists of fate (and even then they were mostly haves who had been mistaken for have-nots and had to rediscover their true, noble station). 

Readers rarely complained about the over-representation of wealthy characters in literature. That's because poor people couldn't read.

The middle class is a modern invention. The terms wasn't even coined until 1745, and even then it described a small but growing bourgeoisie population. Understandably, these mercantile city-dwellers didn't mind aspirational stories of middle class people becoming aristocrats, and they weren't turned off by stories that gave them glimpses into the lives of aristocrats themselves. As George Orwell pointed out, the middle class always wants to change places with the upper class. The upper class wants to stay where it is. Only the lower class wants equality, because they have the most to gain from it, so peasants might have wanted equality in the form of equal representation in literature, but again, they couldn't read. 

Exporting education to the lower classes is an even more modern invention. In the 1800s, elementary education became available to the (slim) majority of children, and even then secondary and higher education remained closed off to most students due to sexism and racism. Still, though some would point out that correlation is not causation, I am a firm believer that it was the rise of free, public education that created the middle class in America. 

Now we find ourselves regressing, and I wonder about the effect on literature. Once, when a writer wanted to write a story in which social class wasn't a significant theme, she could simply choose to make the characters middle class. Suddenly, it wasn't a story about poverty or wealth. The characters' class was still relevant, still defining in many ways, but it wasn't a signal to the reader that the character was too foreign to be relatable, or was deserving of pity, or was someone to admire or envy. The character had to earn pity or envy or admiration in other ways. 

And this is what worries me. Sure, it's a small concern in the scope of the problems that will arise as income inequality grows, but it's an issue writers will have to wrestle with. If I create a character who complains about the condition of her second home, I need to worry about have-nots feeling what I feel toward Atwood's protagonist in "The Art of Cooking and Serving." Conversely, I don't know how a much wealthier reader might feel about one of my characters who is, say, searching through the Target circular on Thanksgiving night to go bargain hunting on Black Friday. Do very rich people know what that's like? Do they feel pity for people who have to clip coupons? Disgust? Condescending amusement? If the scene of a family going through those circulars was presented as joyous and warm, would a much wealthier person admire those poorer characters or envy their family bonding? I just don't know. I don't know what's it's like to be very rich. I can try to imagine it, but I can also imagine what it might be like to walk on the moon or swim with mermaids. That doesn't mean I'm good at predicting what real astronauts or real mermaids will identify with in my stories.  

Once the middle class has essentially disappeared as a cultural group in the United States, will it even be possible to write characters without every story feeling like it's a story about class? Maybe that's fine. Maybe it's just a part of acknowledging something we should have been openly discussing all along. I'm very curious to see how writers (of novels, screenplays for TV and film, plays, etc.) handle the bifurcation of our society along economic lines. How are writers managing this question currently? How should they be?

Fun With Really Big Numbers: We Can Totally Afford to End Extreme Poverty in the United States

Today I was listening to Mike Pesca on Slate's The Gist podcast, and he had an interesting riff on Michael Bloomberg. Apparently Bloomberg recently received a prize for a million dollars and was kind enough to give it back to fund ten more prizes for $100,000 a piece for other do-gooders. Nice, right? But here's what Pesca figured out: For Michael Bloomberg's, one million dollars is .003058% of his wealth. Pesca points out that, for a millionaire, a prize of equivalent size would be $30.58. I did a rough calculation to figure out what this equivalent prize would be to me. Michael Bloomberg getting one million dollars is roughly like me getting $1.38 cents added to my annual pre-tax pay. Obviously I'm not a millionaire. But this got me thinking. Specifically, it got me thinking about a point Matthew Yglesias has repeatedly made over in Slate's Moneybox column. Yglesias is persuaded, and has persuaded me, that direct cash payments to poor people are actually the most effective way to confront poverty. It turns out that if we stop condescending to poor people and blaming them for their misery, and actually trust them to make rational decisions about how to improve their lot in life, they make better ones than the people who think they are incapable.

So, just how much money could someone like Michael Bloomberg give to poor people? Here's what I've come up with. [Note: I'm no math whiz, so if I've done any of this incorrectly, please let me know.]

Let's say we only focused our poverty-fighting in the U.S. I know that's jingoistic and also inefficient since a dollar goes a lot further towards fighting poverty in a much poorer country. But it's easy to relate to our fellow citizens, and you'll see at the end why this gets really interesting.

So, there are 313.9 million people living in the United States, according to Google (which probably knows better than anyone, including the government).

Now, a billion is a huge number. It's difficult to wrap your mind around. Imagine a briefcase with a thousand dollars in it. Not too hard to picture, right? Now imagine a thousand of those spread out on a football field or a mall parking lot. Already getting hard to picture, right? Now imagine stacking 999 more briefcases on top of each of those. That's a lot of cash.

It gets easier when you think about how much that is for each of us. If you divided that cash in that parking lot up among all the people in the country, it's $3.19 for each person. That's not just every working adult. That's every baby, every geriatric great-grandma. Everybody. But it's only $3.19.

bloomberg

Big deal, right?

But what if Michael Bloomberg decided to spend only half his wealth by giving it directly to everyone (not counting the cost of postage)? We have to leave him with some money of his own, right? So just half his wealth.

That's $60.85.

All of it?

$121.65 per American.

Still not that big a deal, right?

warren buffett

But what about Warren Buffet? Half his wealth would translate to

$103.53 per American.

$207.07 if he gave all his wealth to individual Americans.

What about Bill Gates?

$123.45 per American.

All his wealth?

$246.90.

But why would Bill Gates cut a check for $246.90 to Warren Buffet? If a million dollar prize is Michael Bloomberg's version of Ben Gorman's $1.38, Bill Gates' check to warren Buffet would just be an insult. It wouldn't be worth paying his secretary to cash it.

So, instead, what if Bill Gates gave all his wealth to only the poorest 1% of Americans?

That would be $24,690.

I can't quite figure out how poor the bottom 1% even are, because if you look at households that make less than $5000 a year, that's 3.52% of all American households. I am trying to imagine what the bottom third of those households get by on in a year, and I just can't do it.

Can you imagine what $24,690 dollars would mean to a family currently living on less than $5000 dollars a year?

And just imagine the stimulative effect on the economy. Those people wouldn't set that money aside for a rainy day. They would immediately spend it on things to improve their desperate circumstances, and that's not to say they would be frivolous with it. They'd buy a car so they could get to a job interview. They'd but a computer so they could write a resume and search for a job. They'd get some much-needed healthcare that isn't covered by Medicaid, something like braces for their kids.

All that money from that one super-poor individual, compounded by over 3 million people spending it all at once would mean a lot of people who make cars and computers and put braces on people's teeth would suddenly have more to spend. Hell, Bill Gates might see such a windfall on his Microsoft stock from all the Windows computers and Windows phones that he'd make a strong comeback that year.

But that's the problem. It would only be that year.

Only once.

But let's consider another alternative.

bar-chart-defense-spending

U.S. military spending was $683.7 billion back in 2011. Let's just use that number, even though it's gone up since then. This number does not include Homeland Security, the money we spend on securing our power stations, the amount we spend on FBI, state troopers, or local police. This is just the U.S. Armed Forces.

$683.7 billion. 683.7 of those parking lots full of a thousand stacks of a thousand cash-filled suitcases.

That’s $2178.08 per American.

Only a tenth of the US Military budget would generate $217.80 for every American.

But we have to have some military defense, right? Well, what if we only cut down our ability to defend ourselves from our enemies (Who? North Korea?) to 90% of our current capacity?

Then, what if we kicked that 10% to the poorest 1% of Americans?

Only a tenth of that would give $21,780.80 for the poorest 1%.

Every year!

Homeless Family

Now, I'm not saying we should fight poverty in this blunt way. Welfare critics believe that cash payments create a perverse incentive not to work, and I think, in this case, that would certainly happen. If someone making $1000 dollars a year gets an annual check for $21,780, who would want to get $2000? But even if you curved it to incentivize work and focused the money and children, the disabled, and a boost to Social Security (which should be means-tested and uncapped anyway, because Warren Buffet does not need his Social Security check, and he can certainly afford to pay just as high a percentage of his income into the system as you and I do), we could end extreme poverty in the U.S. (people living on less than $2 a day) and, by my estimation, double the buying power of everyone living under the federal poverty line.

Now, I know there are some people who will cry, "Socialism!" or even "Communism!" Some of these people simply don't know what those terms mean. Others do but only like their redistribution to go one way, through tax cuts to the wealthiest among us.

To the first group, I'd say, "You are currently looking at a computer screen giving you information through a system developed through government investment called the Internet. That's a form of socialism. Now use the Internet to find out what 'Socialism' and 'Communism' really mean." To the latter group, I'd say, "Suck it, plutocrats. Some of us don't believe liberty necessitates the abject misery of our fellow citizens. This wouldn't raise or lower your taxes by a single penny either way. And it doesn't even take money away from the ultra-rich. So pull your copy of The Fountainhead out of your butt."

I'm not saying we need to cut military spending by 10%. Or 5%. Or 15%. And I'm not saying anybody needs to get a check for 21 grand. Or even a briefcase with one grand in it. I'm saying that Micheal Bloomberg and Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, even with all their wealth, are incapable of ending extreme poverty in this country. They simply can't do it.

But we can. We can afford it. Easily.

Poverty Beats His Children

After coming across this great article which blows up some of the insidious lies that cripple our debate about our country's social safety-net, I remembered a piece I wrote back in June for my previous blog, and I thought it would be worth republishing here.  

Poverty Beats His Children

The other day, a friend of mine voiced the opinion on Facebook that America is the ultimate land of opportunity, and that people who are in poverty are at fault for blaming others for their plight. It was, he argued, a question of perspective. If people are poor, he argued, they should take more responsibility for their circumstances.

My friend isn’t a greedy or hurtful person. Though we haven’t seen each other in almost two decades, based on the pictures of his beautiful, happy family, he strikes me as somebody who has his priorities in order. But this statement got under my skin and has been itching. I’ve been scratching at this for a little over a week now, and I’m not quite sure how to express why this irritates me so much.

Should I begin on purely factual grounds? He states, without evidence, that the United States is one of the foremost countries which provides its people with the ability to raise themselves out of poverty.  “Unlike nearly any other country, you can start in poverty and move into the middle or upper income bracket within a few short years...definitely into a generation.” What he’s describing is something economists call "social mobility." It’s measurable. And he’s simply wrong.  At best, we rank 4^th. When other factors are included, like unemployment, inflation, and respondents’ satisfaction to standard-of-living and employment opportunities, the U.S. comes in 18th. Of the 195 countries our government recognizes, that means we’re not even in the top 5%. That hardly sounds like “unlike nearly any other country” to me.

Or should I challenge his notion that income inequality is irrelevant? He claims that we don’t have “haves” and “have nots”, but “has” and “has more.”  This sounds like merely bit of optimistic semantics. It’s all in one’s perspective, he claims. But that’s wrong, too. The distance between the “have nots” and the “has mores” produces real world consequences. According to economists, it impedes growth in a number of ways. It doesn’t take a lot of economics training to imagine why this would be. People who are far down the economic ladder can’t demand higher salaries. Beggars don’t haggle. When they have lower salaries, they can’t buy as many goods. The ultra-wealthy still live very well, thank you, but they store their money in accounts rather than investing in businesses which sell goods to people on the bottom of the income spectrum because that’s a better investment. If you reduce the buying power of the poor, you reduce the selling opportunities for the rich. This leads to less sales, less employment, less of what economists call “churning”: money growing because it’s changing hands in exchange for real goods and services. Widening income inequality makes some people much richer, and creates the illusion of economic growth when the total GDP is divided to become the Per Capita GDP, but in truth the standard of living of the vast majority of people decreases.

But this kind of sunny optimism is worse than just bad economics. In my friend’s defense of his position, he cites Christian scripture, pointing out that people have an obligation to use the talents they’ve been given to achieve success. He cites the parable in Matthew about the bags of gold entrusted to servants, Matthew 25:14-30. This is what an English teacher would call “bad reading.” The passage is clearly not about money, it’s about faith. The master says, quite clearly, “You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!” If the parable were about money, one would have to imagine that the “things” Jesus is teaching his disciples to take care of are quantities of money. This from a man who told people that they should take all they have and give it to the poor? This from a man who told people to give Caesar his coins back? This from a man who told people that wealth would make it more difficult to get into heaven? This from a man who told people not to store up their treasures on earth? This from a man who, at least according to scripture, was aware that his death was imminent and yet spent more time talking about concern for the poor than any other single topic during the limited time of his ministry? It’s certainly a convenient interpretation to use when one is trying to justify an investment strategy, but it cannot be justified by the text as a whole.

That’s not what bothers me, either, though. I’m not a Christian. If Christians want to pick apart their scripture to justify widening income inequality and callous disregard for the plight of the poor, that’s their business. They can write a new translation which actually includes the phrase “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps,” stick it into the Sermon on the Mount, and shove those words into Jesus’ mouth, and if that’s what they all decide they believe, who am I to argue? I could point out that it’s a very different interpretation of scripture than other Christians have had before, tantamount to a different religion, something earlier Christians would have called a heresy, but they could quite correctly retort that Christianity has changed a lot over the years. Some have learned to read around the misogyny. Most have learned to stop using scripture as a justification for racism and slavery. A growing number are even learning to get around the bigotry towards homosexuals that’s clearly in the text. So if they want to decide that all the commands to care for the poor, to suffer with those who suffer, and to recognize worldy wealth as a threat to their salvation are just cultural relics of a time gone by and scold the poor for having bad attitudes, it is absolutely within their 1^st amendment rights to do so, and they can take that up with their god when they get to the end of the road. That’s no longer my business.

Except…

Except I have to live with these people. And not just this particularly venal and callous kind of Christian, but with a greedy and self-defeating kind of American. This kind of attitude has real-world policy implications which harm my country, my community, my family.

No, that’s not it, either. I can abide people I disagree with, even when their beliefs harm me and mine. I can live with people who deny evolution even though their beliefs hurt our country’s international reputation and our scientific competitiveness. I can live with people who have regressive beliefs about immigration even though their selective notions of law enforcement will split up families, hurt our own economy, and ultimately fail to do anything but align them with racists. I can live with people who deny the reality of global climate change even though their intransigence will have dramatic and disastrous effects on the economic, political, and even physical health of their fellow citizens. I can live with people I find to be wrong. Why? Because I am sure I’m wrong about some things, too, and I’m sure the ways I’m wrong will injure others. Of course, I don’t know how I’m wrong. As Wittgenstien pointed out, “If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely,’ it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.” If I’m wrong about something, I can’t know it at the time. But I can assume I am wrong because I know I’ve been wrong before, and because I know that being wrong about some things has always appeared to be an essential characteristic of every other human being with whom I’ve come into contact, including those people who are far smarter and far wiser than I am. I try to surround myself with the kind of people who can tell me how I am wrong, and I’ll bet this post may motivate a few of them.  I may not know what god to believe in, but I do believe in people, complete with all their absurdity and outright folly. Sartre said “Hell is other people,” but I think other people are the point of existence. Without them, including all their multifaceted wrong-ness, life would be meaningless. An un-observed tree falling in a forest may or may not make a sound, but a man in a crowd who doesn’t care about any of the people around him makes no difference.

And that, ultimately, is why my friend’s point bothers me so much. It’s the callous disregard for others that I cannot abide. I cannot claim to be an expert on poverty from personal experience. As the Everclear song says, I’ve “never had the joy of a welfare Christmas.” I wish I could explain poverty as eloquently as Sherman Alexie does early in his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. (If you haven't read it, do so forthwith.) I just don't have the skill.  But, in my experience, that kind of personal history doesn’t always give people a whole lot of insight into the nature of poverty anyway. I know too many people who raised themselves out of poverty, sometimes terrible, tragic poverty, and their response has been to look back over their shoulders with contempt and say, “I did it. Why can’t they?” I’m starting to recognize that I understand poverty better than some people who experienced it more acutely because, though I might be exactly as middle class as my parents (American social mobility, right?), like them, I’ve chosen to work for people who haven’t escaped poverty. That’s taught me about more than the path out. It’s taught me about the people who are stuck inside.

I came across a great illustration of this today. There's a powerful if unsurprising relationship between effects of dyslexia and the wealth of the dyslexic. Dyslexic children born to wealthy families are identified earlier and are able to get more interventions. As one would expect, they are far more likely to overcome their disability. Now, we could say to a dyslexic, as my friend does, “If you're working has[sic] hard as you can and not getting anywhere....change what you're working at. You need a new perspective or a new path.” But, in this case, we’d be saying, “If you are working hard to learn to read and it’s difficult, you really should have started working hard with a specialist when you were much younger, and in order to do that, you should have been born richer. Choose that path.”

I think my friend doesn’t understand poverty (and again, he is in the company of my middle class friends who climbed out of it themselves). Poverty is an abusive father who beats his children. He stands in the foyer of his house, punching them and kicking them, and they cower in the corner, curled up into tight little balls, trying to protect themselves. Every day his blows rain down on them, but while he beats them, he tells them to get out of his house. Behind him, the door is open. For some, it’s open wide. They are gifted with intelligence, athletic ability, good looks, resilience, perhaps an indomitable will. For others, the door is open just a tiny crack, smaller even than their little bodies. Maybe they are not exceptionally smart or brave or beautiful. Maybe they are afraid to leave the house that at least protects them from the weather. For whatever reason, some of these children remain cowering in the corner, while others make a break for it, scrambling for the door. Some of these escaping children run and don’t look back. “I made it out. Why can’t they? It’s their fault.” Others stay inside all their lives. But here’s the greatest atrocity: We are standing out on the sidewalk, and we can always see into the door, at least a little. We can see Poverty beating down the poor. And, to my amazement, many of us say, “It is their fault. Why don’t they take responsibility for their circumstances? Look at the way their choices keep them inside the house of Poverty?” But we stay out on the sidewalk. I want to ask my friend and anyone else talking about taking personal responsibility for poverty: "Who is supposed to take responsibility for where you stand while the poor suffer? Isn’t that up to you?"