Type: magazine article

Article by Olivier Zunz: “The age of the average emerged from the engineering of high mass consumption during the second industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century, when tinkerers in industry joined forces with scientists to develop new products and markets. The division of labor between them became irrelevant as industrial innovation rested on advances in organic chemistry, the physics of electricity, and thermodynamics. Working together, these industrial engineers and managers created the modern mass market that penetrated all segments of society from the middle out. Thus, in the heyday of the Gilded Age, at the height of the inequality pitting robber barons against the “common man,” was born, unannounced but increasingly present, the “average American.” It is in searching for the average consumer that American business managers at the time drew a composite portrait of an imagined individual. Here was a person nobody ever met or knew, merely a statistical conceit, who nonetheless felt real.

This new character was not uniquely American. Forces at work in America were also operative in Europe, albeit to a lesser degree. Thus, Austrian novelist Robert Musil, who died in 1942, reflected on the average man in his unfinished modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities. In the middle of his narrative, Musil paused for a moment to give a definition of the word average: “What each one of us as laymen calls, simply, the average [is] a ‘something,’ but nobody knows exactly what…. the ultimate meaning turns out to be something arrived at by taking the average of what is basically meaningless” but “[depending] on [the] law of large numbers.” This, I think, is a powerful definition of the American social norm in the “age of the average”: a meaningless something made real, or seemingly real, by virtue of its repetition. Economists called this average person the “representative individual” in their models of the market. Their complex simplification became an agreed-upon norm, at once a measure of performance and an attainable goal. It was not intended to suggest that all people are alike. As William James once approvingly quoted an acquaintance of his, “There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.” And that remained true in the age of the average…(More)”

Article by Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams and Harry Hanbury: “How could it be that the largest-ever recorded drop in childhood poverty had next to no political resonance?

One of us became intrigued by this question when he walked into a graduate class one evening in 2021 and received unexpected and bracing lessons about the limits of progressive economic policy from his students.

Deepak had worked on various efforts to secure expanded income support for a long time—and was part of a successful push over two decades earlier to increase the child tax credit, a rare win under the George W. Bush presidency. His students were mostly working-class adults of color with full-time jobs, and many were parents. Knowing that the newly expanded child tax credit would be particularly helpful to his students, he entered the class elated. The money had started to hit people’s bank accounts, and he was eager to hear about how the extra income would improve their lives. He asked how many of them had received the check. More than half raised their hands. Then he asked those students whether they were happy about it. Not one hand went up.

Baffled, Deepak asked why. One student gave voice to the vibe, asking, “What’s the catch?” As the class unfolded, students shared that they had not experienced government as a benevolent force. They assumed that the money would be recaptured later with penalties. It was, surely, a trap. And of course, in light of centuries of exploitation and deceit—in criminal justice, housing, and safety net systems—working-class people of color are not wrong to mistrust government bureaucracies and institutions. The real passion in the class that night, and many nights, was about crime and what it was like to take the subway at night after class. These students were overwhelmingly progressive on economic and social issues, but many of their everyday concerns were spoken to by the right, not the left.

The American Rescue Plan’s temporary expansion of the child tax credit lifted more than 2 million children out of poverty, resulting in an astounding 46 percent reduction in child poverty. Yet the policy’s lapse sparked almost no political response, either from its champions or its beneficiaries. Democrats hardly campaigned on the remarkable achievement they had just delivered, and the millions of parents impacted by the policy did not seem to feel that it made much difference in their day-to-day lives. Even those who experienced the greatest benefit from the expanded child tax credit appeared unmoved by the policy. In fact, during the same time span in which monthly deposits landed in beneficiaries’ bank accounts, the percentage of Black voters—a group that especially benefited from the policy—who said their lives had improved under the Biden Administration actually declined…(More)”.