ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604270007
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
AT A TIME of economic growth, in a nation of unprecedented wealth, why are Americans so worried about the economic future?
That was a question du jour at a recent conference, "Economics and the '96 Elections," sponsored by the Foundation for American Communications, a media-funded organization waging the uphill battle of trying to instill in journalists a modicum of economic literacy.
Sure, skyrocketing income growth in the first decades after World War II began to level off, around 1970 or so. But according to the way economists reckon such things, the growth didn't stop, it just slowed down. Since 1987, Americans' per-capita after-tax disposable income, correcting for inflation, has risen steadily from $17,106 to $18,752.
Moreover, economist Frank C. Wykoff of Pomona College and the Claremont Graduate School in California sees signs in place for another acceleration of economic growth.
Trade is an economic boon; trade barriers are falling. Communism is an economic bane; communism is dead or dying.
And only now is the economic-growth potential of computers beginning to be tapped, after learning-curve years that may have done more to retard than to accelerate the economy.
Yet pollsters are finding evidence of a public mood out of sync with what seem to be the economic facts.
Vincent Braglio, who has done polling for Republicans, called it "free-floating anxiety," free-floating because there it is not a reaction to any known direct stress. Fredrick Hartwig, who has done polling for Democrats, noted that such anxiety is expressed about the long term, and so is likely to be around for a while.
So why the worries? One answer: the news media.
Reportage of dramatic layoffs at an IBM or an AT&T, goes the argument, is not balanced by reportage of the offsetting if less dramatic creation of new jobs at thousands of places in the country. Too much ink and air time is given the insurgent economics of a Pat Buchanan, for another example, when he's winning only a quarter to a third of the vote in only one political party's primaries.
But the media tend to be followers, not leaders. Concentrating on bad economic news, it seems to me, is more a matter of catering to attitudes already held than of creating or changing attitudes.
And for an accomplished demagogue like Buchanan to see Republican vote-getting potential in expanding his familiar social populism to also embrace un-Republican economic populism also strikes me as important news. Given that the two groups most anxious about the economy, women and racial minorities, don't give much support Buchanan for other reasons, his vote total was impressive.
What if the anxiety isn't quite so free-floating? What if it is grounded in realities that generally go uncaptured by economic statistics?
Consider the rise in disposable personal income noted above. What could be more straightforward evidence of rising economic fortune?
But consider what those numbers don't convey:
The economic impact of changes in family structure.
Two can't live more cheaply than one, but two together can live more cheaply than two separately - and the latter situation, with the rising frequency of divorce and unwed pregnancy, is increasingly the case.
That more couples feel they can afford to break up or to have children without benefit of matrimony could be viewed, I suppose, as an example of a benefit of economic growth: more choice in lifstyle. But for many a single parent, I suspect, economic anxiety is also part of the equation.
Disappointed expectations.
The huge baby-boomer population cohort, reared during the go-go economy of the immediate postwar years, started entering the labor force just as economic growth leveled off. Income growth continued - but not in the big spurts their parents had enjoyed.
The expectation that such high growth rates would continue indefinitely may well have been unrealistic. But the dashing of it could be a real contributor to economic angst.
Unacknowledged declines in hourly income.
When the economy was dominated by assembly-line factory production, with its time clocks and well-defined shifts, workers' hourly pay could be reported with relative reliability. But the shift to a service-oriented conomy, and accompanying changes in the nature of workplace, have made this trickier.
According to one survey, reported recently in The Christian Science Monitor, the lunch "hour" for U.S. office workers has shrunk to an average of 36 minutes. Lack of time to spend with their families, other surveys have shown, is moving up fast as a major complaint of Americans about their lives.
How much of the reported income gains are due simply to longer workdays? How many Americans are working longer hours for the same pay - in effect, a cut in wages?
Maybe the sources of economic anxiety aren't quite so mysterious after all.
LENGTH: Medium: 93 linesby CNB