Socioeconomic disparity

It’s Time To Burst That Bubble You’re In

You can’t see the world clearly from inside it

What in the hell is an average American — really?

Your mind immediately went to the people in your bubble.

The people you live near and work with. Your relatives. The people who go to your church or belong to your clubs. The families of the people your children are friends with. These, to you, are likely “average Americans.”

You may have seen reports about the Wharton School of Business professor who asked her students how much they thought the average American wage might be. Shocker: They had no clue and most of them believed most Americans made very good wages. (A quarter of them thought the average pay was more than six figures!)

This explains how well-off people really do not understand why people like me are angry about … well, everything. Why am I complaining if most of us are making at least $100,000 a year? The system works wonderfully! We should all be ecstatic and completely satisfied with this capitalist playground we are all in!

Of course, if you clicked on this story, you probably already know better. The average American salary is less than half that.

But well-off people are the ones running the world, setting policies and making laws. They are doing so without a clear idea of how most Americans really live.

I live in a gritty little working-class town, but there are well-off people living here, too.

For many years, I was the editor of what used to be a daily newspaper, and that gave me a look through the window into the lives of all kinds of people. I’ve had face time with local, state and national politicians as well as very poor people trying to live in unlivable conditions. I have friends who are quite well-off and others who are dirt poor.

I was a member of a community organization (dues paid by my employer) and as such had lunch once a week with local leaders at a country club, where I’d listen to people talk about very, very different subjects than the topics my poorer friends would discuss.

There was quite a bit of talk about upcoming vacations, for example, and taking multiple vacations a year was thought to be absolutely normal — because for them, it was. And almost all of these folks earnestly consider themselves middle class.

This isn’t typical.

Most of us stay in our bubbles and make wild assumptions about people unlike us. Several times, I’ve had the uncomfortable but enlightening experience of having my better-off friends express real shock at learning my income level.

They assumed it was about double what it really was. Maybe that’s why so many times they’d unthinkingly suggest I make my life easier by enjoying a spa day or hiring someone to clean my house. They honestly couldn’t imagine that someone might not be able to afford such a splurge.

I can ‘pass’ as privileged.

I’m white and have a college education. I’m well-read. I know how to dress to fit in well enough when I want to. But also, I always scrub my own toilets, make almost all our food from scratch and take some fairly extreme budget measures.

In some ways, I definitely am privileged — I’ve always had health insurance, and although I shop carefully, it’s been many years since I truly worried about not being able to purchase enough groceries. I don’t take any of that for granted.

What we need is some kind of exchange program.

But instead of sending teens to live for a semester with people from another country, we’d assign people to spend meaningful time with people from different income levels.

The very first thing the well-off folks would notice is that lots of poor people are just as smart and hard-working as they are. I think the poor people would, in many cases, be surprised to see that many of the well-off people actually work hard, too. That’s why so many of them honestly believe they are self-made people: It’s not unusual for them to have put in lots of hard work and effort to get where they are. (They simply don’t see that it’s common for others to have done the same but not to have made any traction.)

In other cases, yes, the stereotypes hold true.

There certainly are lazy poor people who have made incredibly dumb life choices that have held them back. There are absolutely well-off people who inherited a family business and have skated along ever since. It’s a big country; there are lots of different people in it.

Have you ever watched two toddlers meet? In about five seconds, they’re friends. They don’t query each other about what preschool they attend and make judgments accordingly. They just start playing.

We adults are very careful about who we play with. Where do you work? Where do you live? We size people up and make sure they’re bubble-worthy. We don’t usually do this on purpose or even know we’re doing it … but we do it.

Imagine how different our society would be if we didn’t.