Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
The middle class looks nervously up, then down. Which is the greater economic threat, the overclass or the underclass? Perceived answers to this question now shape political allegiances in the United States.
Today’s Economist
Perspectives from expert contributors.
Not that the middle class is sure where its boundaries lie. Much depends on what other labels are offered – such as working class or upper middle or lower middle rather than just plain middle.
But whatever its exact size, the middle class is usually considered more deserving – and more threatened – than those at the extremes. Those on the left argue that the overclass threatens the country’s well-being, while those on the right point their fingers at the underclass. President Obama wants to raise taxes on millionaires; Republicans want to cut social programs directed at the poor.
Occupy Wall Street accuses the top 1 percent of greed; Tea Party conservatives accuse welfare recipients of sloth, another deadly sin.
Greed is often personified by vampires, strong, sexy superhumans with mesmerizing powers who suck the life blood from their unwitting victims.
In 2004, The Village Voice published a cover image of George W. Bush sinking his fangs into the neck of a fainting Statue of Liberty, inspiring a similar image on the April 2011 cover of Mother Jones. In the pages of Rolling Stone, the journalist Matt Taibbi famously described the investment bank Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Sloth and incompetence are often personified by zombies, the living dead, mumbling, stumbling creatures that gain strength only in numbers. These are less a threat to specific individuals than to civilization as a whole.
Jason Mattera’s recent book, “Obama Zombies,” asserts that “Barack Obama lobotomized a generation.” A local Republican group in Virginia aroused controversy at Halloween by publishing an image of the commander in chief as a zombie with a bullet hole through his skull. One conservative blog post explicitly refers to African-American entitlement zombies.
Government employees are often tagged zombies, and Ron Paul, a Republican presidential candidate, applies the term to those who pay income taxes without complaint.
Maybe the vampire/zombie imagery reveals the impact of psychology on economic perceptions – some people fear most the dominance, some the dependence of others.
Vampires aren’t all bad. Some can be redeemed by human love, as in the “Twilight” saga. Others could learn to subsist on synthetic blood rather than emptying their friends. Likewise, zombies can be cured or used to enliven Jane Austen novels.
Still, the horror show on both sides testifies to class anxiety in the face of economic stress. It also illustrates the many ways that economic incentives can go awry. Offer huge rewards to winners of a competition and you will likely elicit greater effort and innovation – up to a point. On the other hand, you will also increase the temptation to collude and cheat.
Offer public assistance to those who can’t support themselves, and you will help protect and develop their capabilities – up to a point. On the other hand, you will also increase the temptation to lie and shirk.
No economic system can eliminate both forms of misbehavior, but a good one should surely try to discourage both.
Many people, including me, have decided that the overclass poses the most serious threat today to the middle class in the United States because it markets the assertion that the underclass is the source of all our problems.
What the middle class decides will depend on its assessments of the relative threats of increasingly concentrated wealth at the top versus growing economic desperation at the bottom.
It will also depend on whether the middle class believes it can climb the economic pole. Right now, it appears to sliding down. And its white collars appear to be slightly stained with blood.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=297c6de93c54d77b1cfc436ceb634606