Why did the American middle class boom after WWII, and how do we get it booming again? New York Times economics reporter Jim Tankersley joins Paul to lay out the thesis of his new book, ‘The Riches of This Land’—that the economy will thrive when everyone can fully participate in it.
Jim Tankersley covers economic and tax policy for The New York Times. Over more than a decade covering politics and economics in Washington, he has written extensively about the stagnation of the American middle class and the decline of economic opportunity in wide swaths of the country.
Twitter: @jimtankersley
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The Riches of This Land: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781541767836
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Paul Constant:
Hi, I’m Paul Constant. I’m a writer at Civic Ventures. I am very excited to be joining you today in this episode because we are talking with Jim Tankersley. He is the economics reporter at the New York Times, before that he was at the Washington Post. He’s one of the leading economics reporters in the country and he’s here today with his new book, The Riches of This Land, which is a history of the American middle class, how it was once the driving force of our economy and how it has been diminished in the years since, and what we can do to bring it back.
First, I was wondering if you could give us your slate, your name and title, please.
Jim Tankersley:
Sure. It’s Jim Tankersley, tax and economics reporter at the New York Times and the author of The Riches of This Land: The Untold True Story of America’s Middle Class.
Paul Constant:
And for our readers who haven’t read it, if you could maybe give a little summary of what it’s about.
Jim Tankersley:
Yeah. The book is the story of why the middle class boomed after World War II in the United States and what we need to get it booming again, after decades of stagnation and decline and the wonderful hopeful conclusion, what history shows us is that the American economy grows and thrives when women and men of color and immigrants get ahead, are given more opportunity, when we reduce discrimination and give them more pathways to contribute their talents to our economy. It worked in the fifties and sixties and seventies and it can work again now. We have an economy primed with talented people who are being held back by the forces of discrimination and by unleashing them, we can absolutely set things right again.
Paul Constant:
And because this book is so explicitly about the American middle class, I find on this podcast and just in terms of writing, the middle class can mean a lot of different things to a lot of people. To a politician, it basically means everyone in the US.
Jim Tankersley:
Literally everyone.
Paul Constant:
I was wondering if I could ask you to define the middle class for the purposes of this conversation.
Jim Tankersley:
Absolutely. I define the middle class by sort of an economic security definition. It’s not an income you earn, it’s whether you can afford some basic tenets of what I think Americans have long come to believe are the things you need to be secure economically. To own a home, to have a car in the driveway, to send your kids to school, to retire safely and securely and to have healthcare. Basically the definition actually that the Obama administration used in its middle class task force, right after they took office. And I just think it’s the sort of security based idea that is, it includes more people than a very, very narrow income definition, but obviously a lot fewer people than we would have had if we had kept up with the boom years of the middle class.
Paul Constant:
Something you’ve already talked about here, I find that when you’re communicating about economics, it’s easy to fall into a situation where you’re comparing the past to the present and using the past to describe the future. For instance, the new deal is a frequently used policy touchstone, but the number of people whose lives were directly affected by the new deal is rapidly dwindling. I think you do a good job in this book of mixing the contemporary with the past, in terms of it’s not a nostalgia trip on the good old days of the middle class. Did you have to, in the writing of the book, sort of do any work to pull it back, to keep it from being about the good old days of America economically speaking?
Jim Tankersley:
What a great question. I do worry that we fall into that trap. And I’ve been a full-time economics reporter for a decade now and I was a politics reporter before that so I’ve spent a lot of time writing about the middle class and I spent even more time than that thinking about it. And part of that is because when I was a kid growing up in the eighties and nineties, you heard all these stories about the great middle class and what the fifties and sixties were like. And it was very sepia toned and I think there’s a real danger that a lot of people have. And certainly because our politicians do it of falling into that trap of just comparing everything to the past. But the point of this book is to actually blow up some of the myths of that past.
And I think that allows me to root it a little more in the present. Part of what I’m trying to do is tell you about the workers who, the white guys who have told us that sepia toned story often just sort of leave out of the story. Women surging into the workforce from 1915 to 1980 is a huge reason why we had such great economic growth and why so many families were able to get ahead and breaking down barriers for Black men and Black women, absolutely contributed to this productivity boom, that again, pulled people ahead. They get left out of that story. The civil rights story often just gets talked about like a social justice story, which of course it is, but it’s a really important economic story. The Civil Rights Act is arguably the most important economic piece of legislation we’ve passed as a country in a century. And when you revisit the past, I think you can make important statements about the present and the future when you correct those myths.
Paul Constant:
Why do you think there’s such a resistance to talking about civil rights in economics terms? Do you think it’s racism? Sometimes it can be tricky to talk about the economics of race because it’s kind of a minefield, it’s easy to talk about it in a way that can be perceived as racist or insensitive or thoughtless. Do you think that has something to do with it?
Jim Tankersley:
I think there’s two big things going on. One is that Americans have sort of long and I mean white Americans, the white Americans who wrote the history books that I learned from as a kid growing up, they were the winners in that economy. And they wrote the story that seemed true to their experience of being the winners. And that left out these economic gains from civil rights, even though they felt good about the social justice gains from civil rights. But I think that the second part is that we have this weird tic in America of separating issues of race and economics and social change when really they’re deeply entwined. You can’t talk about economic outcomes in the United States without absolutely talking about the way that they have varied by race, even for workers with the exact same education levels or skills throughout American history.
It’s just not a true full picture of the American economy to exclude race from the discussion. That was the thing that really struck me after 2016, reflecting on the way the coverage went. There was just so much debate about were Donald Trump’s voters motivated by economic anxiety or sort of a cultural racial anxiety? And as I kind of try to lay out in the book, I think it’s really hard to disentangle those two forces, both in those voters’ minds and for the experience of the other voters who didn’t support Donald Trump in that election.
Paul Constant:
You do talk about in this book, I think it’s going to be probably one of the main points of interviews coming up for you is the story with the headline, How Trump Won: The Revenge of Working Class Whites. And in the book you say, “What I wrote was correct, in retrospect, it was also dangerous.” I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that experience and also if you think that people are still falling into that same, I don’t want to use the word trap, but that same issue that you had as you were writing it out.
Jim Tankersley:
When I was a reporter in 2016, I was at the Washington Post at the time and I was working in sort of an interesting role covering economic policy, but getting to do a lot of political writing and like a lot of reporters, I was really interested when Donald Trump came on the scene, that he got all the support that seemed more durable than a lot of people had thought. He was not this flash in the pan celebrity. And so I spent a lot of time trying to interrogate through polling and through interviews with actual voters, where his support was coming from. And it was clear that there were a lot of forces there. And we were able to pick those apart, the resentment toward immigrants and refugees and fear of social change and fear of economic decline and actual experienced economic decline. They all were a part of Donald Trump’s appeal.
But we spent so much time trying to get to the bottom of that question of why were Trump’s voters going to do this? And why did some voters swing in the industrial Midwest from Obama to Trump? That we missed a complete second story and I barely mentioned it in this election meta analysis piece that I wrote about working class whites revolting for Trump. And that’s that working class Black Americans were also really hurting economically still. They had still struggled to recover from a recession that was years in the rear view mirror and we spent as a profession very little time interrogating their concerns. And specifically we didn’t do it because we were not perceiving them as swing voters because Black voters were reliably going to go for Hillary Clinton.
But in fact, they were swing voters. They were swinging in between whether to vote or not to vote. And subsequent research has shown that there was a drop off and that that was an important choice that those voters were making between, do I see anything for me in this political system right now or not? And we didn’t interrogate their concerns at all. First off, we missed a big story and that’s on us and that’s bad and that you’re not fully informing your audience when you miss it. But second all, we gave white workers, this idea who are struggling, who have been struggling, we gave them this idea they were struggling alone. And I think we helped perpetuate the idea that there’s this zero sum game in the economy where white workers are pitted against nonwhite workers and immigrants in particular. And boy, that is just playing right into the hands of powerful white men who have pitted groups of workers against each other since before the founding of the nation.
And I just think that the coverage was bad in that way and I was part of it. In the book, I take the blame for my role in it. I wrote stories about Black workers, just not nearly as much as white workers. I do think and this is the sort of hopeful coda to the story, that the media have been much better about it this time around. There are just a lot more stories about the struggles of working Black and Latino Americans, particularly in this pandemic. And part of that is just a continued evolution of a field that has been overly white for too long. But part of it also was I hope some learned experience of, hey, we need to do a better job reflecting the coverage of all the problems of our country and not just this particular group that was going hard for Trump.
Paul Constant:
Did that experience of interrogating your own approach to the reporting, has that changed the way that you write your stories to people? Now, as a writer, whenever I write the word we, I have to sort of sit down and interrogate myself and say, “Who is the we I’m talking to?” Because for an embarrassing amount of time, the we, I think was just people like me, white people who had a job and were relatively comfortable. Is that something that you’ve thought of more as the years have gone by?
Jim Tankersley:
I have for sure. And I want to want to say in this chapter, it’s not just that I look back on the stories and count up my own. I run some data analysis on TV coverage and on some print media coverage and it’s just embarrassing how lopsided the coverage was. And then thinking about my own coverage and things that I read, I do something in the book that that was a little jarring the first time my editor at the book read it. And then I had to sort of explain to him why I was doing it and I ended up putting the explanation in the book, which is, I changed the default of how I describe the people in my stories. Every time I describe a white person, I immediately start by saying, who is white. And every time I described a black person, I did not immediately do that.
Sometimes I did. Sometimes I didn’t, which is exactly how many news outlets identify people of color still. If you are white, often your race is not noted. If you are black, often your race is noted almost immediately after you’re introduced in the story. I don’t see any reason why that should be the default. And so I think trying to flip that on its head, may be a little jarring for readers in the book, but I explain why I do it as part of sort of exactly what you’re saying. Okay, who is we here? Well, we are everyone and you need to think sort of much more holistically about that in your writing.
Paul Constant:
I thought the writing on inclusion in this book was especially inspiring. I really enjoyed and I had a few revelations thinking about inclusion in the economy. You’ve talked already about how it’s already been shaped in the past, but do you think there are signs of hope for inclusion in the future?
Jim Tankersley:
Yeah, I do. I actually think that the protest this summer for all of the turmoil, progress in America is not clean and tidy usually. And we’re in a very tumultuous period right now, but I think the protests and the way that public opinion has shifted in the midst of them, I draw a lot of hope from that. I think white Americans, not all of them, but a lot of them have had a revelation in the last few months where they say, “Wait, discrimination against non-white Americans remains much higher in more institutions.” Institutionalized racism is a bigger problem than a lot of white Americans wanted to let on that it was.
And so in those admissions, I completely understand, and my colleagues have started to write some very good stories about sort of the wariness of some Black community leaders about, is this for real, from a real shift from white people. And I understand that reaction, but I take the hopeful view that this is signaling more recognition. Because again, if we can finish the work of civil rights and reduce discrimination, I really think that we have that opportunity here. We have all the raw materials you need for a booming economy, again, just in the talents of our people. And that’s, they’re being held back.
Paul Constant:
I wanted to talk a little bit about the recession, because it seems to me that this one is it’s unfolding differently than other recessions in that it seems to me that wealthy Americans aren’t feeling the effects of the recession largely. And it’s out of their view because the poor people are getting it in the teeth, but the stock market is relatively unharmed. Do you agree with that assessment that it’s, it’s a recession for poor people and not for wealthy people so much? And also is that a different situation than we’ve seen in the past?
Jim Tankersley:
I think it is even more than typically a recession that is really concentrated effects on marginalized people. Yes, it’s a recession for poor people. It’s a recession non-white workers and it’s a recession for women. They’re all hit harder for very particular to the virus reasons. Black Americans, Latino Americans have been more likely to get the virus, have been hit harder by it as their share of the population in terms of deaths and are just much more likely to work in the frontline essential jobs where you’re at higher risk of contracting the virus. Then they’re also, they entered the recession with less wealth and lower incomes then similarly positioned whites so they didn’t really have a cushion to ride this out. And meanwhile, they are at higher risk of losing their jobs because they don’t work nearly as often in jobs where you can work from home.
And it’s that work from home divide that I think is really different this time. You’re right. There were a lot of high income Americans who are just sitting like I am right now, in a home office and able to do their jobs every day. And yes, daily life has been disrupted, but that’s a very minor thing compared to the enormous pain that lower income nonwhite in particular households are facing. And then you toss the childcare problems on. It is one thing if you’re working from home to be scrambling with kids who aren’t in school, and that is maybe a real crimp on your productivity, I think it almost certainly is, but it’s quite another thing if you have to go to work to do your job and your five year old child is not able to go to kindergarten.
And so we are seeing women have to quit their jobs for this. And this is a real concern, both for those workers and for the overall economy. Now I do think there’s a way this could rebound on rich people, which is that if this persists, the drop in demand that could come from it is going to end up hitting white collar workers in ways that won’t hit the very, very rich right away, but it will start to trickle upward. It’s just right now, like you said, they’ve been much more shielded from it and they’ve recovered faster from the losses they’ve had. And I worry immensely that this will just perpetuate a lot of the inequalities we went into the recession with and that’s why I think we have to be really, really careful about getting help to those most vulnerable Americans and helping them to springboard out of this when the time is safe to reopen the economy.
Paul Constant:
It seems as though at some point, the collapse in consumer demand has got to eventually reach its way to the top, although they seem to be defying gravity at the moment.
Jim Tankersley:
Yeah, no, I think that’s a good way of putting it.
Paul Constant:
One of my biggest complaints about economics books in particular is that they generally consist with nine chapters about how terrible everything is and then the 10th chapter is a bunch of policy prescriptions, one of which is usually increasing the EITC or something like that. You handle that in a really interesting way in this book and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit, obviously we want people to go out and buy the book, but if you could talk a little bit about what you think could be done in the longterm to help the middle class.
Jim Tankersley:
I have some policy prescriptions in there. I talked to a lot of very smart economists over the years, and I, for the most part, my policy prescriptions are running down with some very smart people have told me from across the spectrum to be really candid. There’s some good market oriented ideas and there’s some good government program solutions and things like, one that I’ve been talking about a lot that I think is really important is that we just need much more robust childcare support in this country. And if we had it, we would be able to free up women to work more and to rise further in their jobs and to sort of shake off the kind of institutional constraints that are holding them back. Because we as a society have placed the burden of caregiving disproportionately on women in a way that our businesses have not adjusted to equalize their outcomes and opportunities to account for that.
And so I think there’s a lot of gains to be had there and I lay out some specific things along those lines, but then I get to the end and I say, what I really believe, which is that there isn’t a five point plan that’s going to solve the problems that I’ve laid out. I think discrimination in the American economy has gotten acutely bad in some very bad ways and has moved backwards in some ways from the gains of civil rights. And then other gains they were left incomplete. And so both the incredibly simple and incredibly difficult conclusion I’ve come to is the very best thing we could do for this economy is to root out systemic racism and sexism and abolish it. If we could truly create, have a national commitment to finishing the work of civil rights, then we really could create an economy that works for everyone in the way we want it to.
And I mean that we as everybody, I think that it would be a very, very good and just thing to happen to equalize opportunity for long time marginalized Americans, but it also would help white people. It would help working class white people because the economy would grow faster, perform better, produce the kind of income gains to lift everyone up. And so it is not your typical chapter 10. It is in some ways more challenging, in some ways more simple, but I believe strongly in it. I just think that it is the path we must walk if we want to have a true boom of shared prosperity again.
Paul Constant:
To close up, we have a couple of questions that we ask all of our guests. The first one is if you’re a benevolent dictator and we hope you’re benevolent dictator, what policies would you implement to get us out of this recession as quickly as possible?
Jim Tankersley:
Man, it’s always tricky to play a benevolent dictator in your mind. I think that the clearest, simplest and most important one is that we have to get control of the virus. I would implement an immediate massive effort to do testing and tracing so that we know pretty much in real time where the virus is and where it’s safe to go and where not. I think that would be just an enormous help and you have to do that first and until that’s ready, you just have to sustain the people and the businesses who are unable to make it through for no fault of their own. I think again, sounds simple, but economists like Paul Romer have just been beating the bush from the very beginning of this crisis that until we really can give people confidence that they can leave the house safely and engage in economic activity, we’re not going to get anywhere close to back to normal.
Paul Constant:
Why do you do this work?
Jim Tankersley:
Man, I love this work. I have been a journalist since I was a freshman in high school and walked into the office of our local, my small town newspaper publisher, who sat behind us in church and gave me a job turning weddings and obituary releases into small copy for the newspaper. I love talking to people and hearing their stories and bringing them to the world. And I love using human stories to help people understand complicated issues and things like economics in particular. And I think in particular, this book really grows from a question that gnawed at me from when I was in high school, when I was watching the timber industry in rural Oregon where I grew up, kind of melt down and with it take a lot of opportunity for middle class jobs away from guys I went to high school with. And I had this question in my mind, well when is the economy going to start working for them again? For guys like the guys I went to high school with, blue collar, working class and mostly white in my high school, men.
And then, over the years, that question grew into something much bigger, which was when is the economy going to start working again for working people, for all working Americans, Black, white, Latino, immigrants, native born, women and men? And that has sort of consumed me in my entire economics reporting career and for a lot of my politics writing career. And so I wrote the book because I basically felt like it was too urgent of a question not to share the answer with to the world.
Paul Constant:
Thank you so much for writing this book. Congratulations on finally seeing it out in the world. I know it’s a long process and thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it.
Jim Tankersley:
Oh, thank you so much for having me and for the wonderful questions. It was just a delight so thank you so much.
Speaker 3:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook @CivicAction and Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on Medium at Civic Skunk Works and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram @PitchforkEconomics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.