When I cite statistics showing that Americans have never had higher incomes or greater wealth than they do today, some readers respond that not everyone is doing nearly so well.
That’s true, of course, as it has been in all times and places.
And unless the wildest dreams of the AI optimists come true, it will be the case in the future as well.
However, while millions struggle economically in the U.S., our poor are rich by historical standards.
This may sound callous to those unfamiliar with the facts. So let me better acquaint you with them.
When the Heritage Foundation analyzed federal survey data on poor households, it found that 80% had air conditioning.
I grew up in the Deep South in a home without AC. In 1970, in fact, just 36% of all Americans had it.
The typical poor household also has a clothes washer, a refrigerator, and a stove. More than nine in 10 have a microwave, and more than a third have a dishwasher. Nearly all have flat-panel TVs, and more than half have two or more.
Nearly three-quarters own a car or truck, and nearly a third own two or more.
The typical American below the poverty line has more living space than the average resident of Paris, London, Vienna, or Athens. And that’s the average resident, not the poor.
Then there’s the smartphone. Pew Research found that roughly eight in 10 Americans in households earning less than $30,000 a year own one.
The phone in a poor teenager’s pocket has more computing power than NASA used to put men on the moon.
It holds a camera, a video recorder, a music library, a GPS navigator, a flashlight, a calculator, an encyclopedia, and a link to virtually every book, lecture, newspaper, and film ever produced.
Twenty years ago, a billionaire couldn’t have bought that device. It didn’t exist.
Now let’s step back a few generations.
In 1940, within living memory of many Americans, the Census found that 31% of homes had no running water, 44% had no bathtub or shower, and 35% had no flush toilet.
Half of all households heated with coal and another quarter with wood. Laundry meant a washboard, a wringer, and a clothesline. Dishes meant a basin and elbow grease. Summer meant a hand fan and a sleepless night.
Go back further, to 1900, and the average American could expect to live into his late 40s.
Roughly one child in 10 died before his first birthday. Diseases we now shrug off with a round of antibiotics routinely killed people of every class.
In 1924, the son of President Calvin Coolidge died of an infected blister he got playing tennis on the White House courts.
Today, the poorest American with a Medicaid card has access to antibiotics that were unavailable to the son of the most powerful man in the world a century ago.
Now widen the lens to all of human history.
For almost all of the roughly 300,000 years our species has been around, nearly everyone lived in extreme poverty.
As recently as 1820, around nine in 10 people on earth lived in acute deprivation. Life was, in Hobbes’s famous phrase, “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Famine was a regular visitor. Most people never traveled more than a few miles from where they were born. Most never learned to read. Most spent their entire lives doing backbreaking physical labor just to stay fed.
Kings and emperors lived better, of course. But consider what they didn’t have.
Louis XIV, the Sun King, built the most magnificent palace in Europe. Yet Versailles had no air conditioning, no central heating, no refrigeration, no flush toilets, no electric light, no recorded music, no penicillin, and no way to talk to someone on the other side of the world.
The poor family in a modest American apartment enjoys comforts the Sun King couldn’t have commanded with his entire treasury.
How did this happen? Not through government decree. It happened because free markets, innovation, and competition relentlessly drove down the cost of goods that were once luxuries.
The first window air conditioners, microwaves, cellphones, and flat-screen TVs were playthings of the rich.
Entrepreneurs competing for customers made them better and cheaper year after year until they reached nearly everyone.
That’s the unsung story of capitalism. It doesn’t just make the rich richer. Its greatest gift goes to ordinary and poor people, whose daily lives are transformed by products that once only the wealthy could afford.
None of this means poverty in America is imaginary, or that poor families don’t struggle. They do.
The things that have gotten dramatically cheaper are mostly manufactured goods. Meanwhile, the costs of housing, health insurance, childcare, and college have climbed much faster than wages.
Many low-income families live one car repair or medical bill away from crisis.
And poverty isn’t only about material things. It’s also about insecurity, stress, limited opportunity, and the sting of falling behind the people around you.
But we should keep things in perspective.
When politicians describe poor Americans as though they are living in a Dickens novel, they’re simply wrong.
By the standards of the rest of human history, and much of the world today, America’s poor live remarkably well.
They are not poor by history’s standards. The goal now is to make sure they don’t stay poor by ours.
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