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The Rich Don’t Always Win
Chase, “the first electric light installed in my grandfather’s house in New England, and the first automobile on the street outside, and I have recently watched on television a space capsule with men aboard coming down on target in the ocean.” Yet for Stuart Chase, as for Frederick Lewis Allen, the technological miracles of their new midcentury age paled against America’s remarkable economic transformation, “the achievement of an economy of abundance, an affluent society, where for the first time in history poor people are in a minority.” And rich people? Their “gracious plantations, estates, and mansions,” Chase related, had gone “up for sale to innkeepers and rest homes, if not carved into subdivisions.” The grand rich who had somehow managed to dodge the subdivisions, the New Yorker writer Kenneth Lamott observed in , amount to archaic “survivals” from “an earlier epoch,” nothing more, “not men of our own time” and unquestionably “not the men of the future.” The fortunes of these remaining wealthy, Lamott added, have the same long-range prospects as “sand castles that stand against an incoming tide.” Lamott and other observers were not experiencing some social mirage. America had indeed become more equal. In , before the Great Depression, America’s most affluent percent were taking in nearly one of every four dollars in national income. By the early s, they were grabbing a mere one dollar in ten. The contrast higher up America’s economic summit ran even starker. In , nearly half the income the nation’s top percent collected settled in the pockets of the top percent’s top tenth. This top . percent of Americans—in effect, the richest one of every thousand—pulled in nearly percent of the nation’s income in the late s. The comparable share for ’s top one in a thousand: just percent. The shape of America’s income distribution, Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills would note in , had become “less a pyramid with a flat base than a fat diamond with a bulging middle.” What explained this middle-class bulge, this massive tilt away from the top? One of midcentury America’s most eminent economists, Simon Kuznets, saw the nation’s growing equality as a natural consequence of economic maturation. Any industrializing society, Kuznets argued in his American Economic Association presidential address, will see income divides widen dramatically as industrializing