May 09, 2010
You get paid a really big premium for ignorance at the NYT, just ask Thomas Friedman who undoubtedly gets paid more than 99 percent of his generation. Thomas Friedman likes to tout the fact that there are still good paying jobs for people without skills in every column he writes.
He’s in top form today, getting just almost everything wrong about the current economic situation as he tells readers: “My generation, ‘The Baby Boomers,’ turned out to be what the writer Kurt Andersen called ‘The Grasshopper Generation.’ We’ve eaten through all that abundance like hungry locusts.”
Of course those who know anything about the economy know that the vast majority of baby boomers have not fared especially well. In the years before the baby boomers entered the workforce wages for most workers rose consistently between 1-2 percent a year, after adjusting for inflation. However wages began to stagnate in the mid-70s, when the oldest baby boomers were in their mid-twenties and the youngest were not yet teenagers. Baby boomers entered this labor market and most saw very little gain in living standards relative to what their parents had. Many had to go heavily into debt to buy and hold a home, to send their kids through college or to cover the cost of a serious illness.
There were gains in living standards during the last three decades, but they overwhelmingly went to the people at the top. This included the Wall Street crew, corporate executives, highly educated professionals, like doctors and lawyers, and elite columnists like Mr. Friedman. This was not an accident. These people designed economic policies that were intended to redistribute income upward. The government became openly hostile to unions. It pushed trade policies that made our factory workers compete with low-paid workers in Mexico and China while leaving our doctors and lawyers largely protected from the same sort of competition. The government also deregulated sectors like airlines, telecommunications, and trucking that offered good paying jobs for millions of workers without college degrees. The result of these and other deliberate policies was to ensure that most of the gains from productive growth went to those at the top rather than the vast majority of baby boomers.
Now the baby boom cohort is retiring. The vast majority have next to nothing to support themselves other than their Social Security. The vast majority of baby boomers do not have the defined benefit pensions that their parents did. They never had much money in 401(k) accounts and they lost much of what they did have in the stock crashes of 2000-2002 and 2008. More importantly, they lost most of their home equity, the major source of wealth for most families, with the collapse of the housing bubble.
We can blame the average auto worker, shoe salesperson and school teacher for not being smarter about the macroeconomy than Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, and other managers of economic policy, but the fact is that they made the mistake of listening to these people. They thought that stock prices and house prices would just keep rising forever. Sure, this was stupid, but Rubin, Greenspan and the rest were supposed to be really smart people, and it was their job to know the economy. Too bad Thomas Friedman was never smart enough to notice either the stock bubble or the housing bubble and to warn his readers.
Instead, Thomas Friedman wants to lecture us all about how we have been living too lavishly. We have to give up our Social Security and Medicare and accept lower living standards. This would be laughable except for the immense political power and the hundreds of billions of dollars that stand behind Friedman’s agenda.
At the moment, the concern about deficits is painfully absurd. If only Friedman could learn the most elementary economics he would know that the economy’s problem right now is too little spending, not too much. He probably hasn’t noticed, but the unemployment rate is almost 10.0 percent. If we got frugal now, then the unemployment rate would go still higher — of course that probably would not matter where Mr. Friedman lives.
Over the long-term we do face a problem with our broken health care system. This is the cause of our projected long-term budget problems. Of course fixing our health care system would hurt the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical companies and highly paid medical specialists, so that is not on Mr. Friedman’s agenda. Instead, he wants to tell school teachers and auto workers (both current and retired) that they have to tighten their belts. And, he gets paid big bucks for this.
