Paul L.

On radically different incomes life in America can be surprisingly similar. Imagine three single mothers, each raising a ten-year-old boy. One is a public-school teacher in Tampa earning $50,000 a year. Another is a lawyer in Atlanta earning $200,000. The third is a venture-capital partner in Chicago earning $1 million. On paper, they inhabit three different Americas. One earns twenty times more than another. One is 25th percentile im wealth the other 84th the last one top 1%. They describe inequality in the USA. Now look at their sons. All three wake up with electricity, running water, refrigeration, heating and air conditioning. They eat plenty of food, ride in safe modern cars, wear sneakers, watch YouTube, play the same video games, use similar phones and tablets and have access to vaccines, antibiotics, dentists and modern medicine. One goes to public school, another to private school, the third perhaps to an elite private school. One flies economy once a year, another travels frequently, the third may occasionally fly private. Their houses, neighborhoods and vacations are different. But their actual daily lives are far less different than their mothers’ incomes suggest. The socialist argument has always been about equality of outcomes. Well, look around. In much of ordinary material life, capitalism has already produced something remarkably close to it. The millionaire’s refrigerator does not keep milk twenty times fresher. Her son’s iPhone does not make YouTube twenty times more entertaining. He cannot eat twenty breakfasts, sleep twenty hours at once or enjoy a video game twenty times more because his mother earns twenty times as much. For several hours every day, these three boys may be doing almost exactly the same thing. This would have been unimaginable two centuries ago. The child of a rich family and the child of a laborer often lived in genuinely different physical worlds. One had plentiful food, warmth, books, servants, doctors and transportation. The other might lack adequate calories or clean water. Industrial capitalism destroyed much of that inequality by doing something socialism never managed very well: making formerly scarce things cheap enough for almost everyone. Cars, refrigerators, televisions, air conditioning, computers and smartphones began as luxuries and became mass-market goods. The entrepreneur became rich precisely by making what the rich had available to everybody else. And that may explain one of the great ironies of the new American enthusiasm for socialism. Capitalism’s victories are now so complete that nobody notices them. Clean water is not considered wealth. Neither is electricity. Nor refrigeration. Nor an air-conditioned bedroom, instant global communication, unlimited music, thousands of films or a computer in your pocket more powerful than anything that existed when many of today’s billionaires were children. Those things have become invisible because almost everyone has them. What remains visible are the inequalities capitalism has not eliminated: the mansion, the private school, the beachfront house, the prestigious university, the best neighborhood. But if the political demand is that ordinary people should be able to enjoy many of the same basic experiences as the rich, something extraordinary has already happened. Put these families on a chart and the inequality looks enormous. Put their ten-year-old boys on three sofas at eight o’clock at night, eating pizza in sweatpants and staring at nearly identical screens, and the difference becomes surprisingly hard to see. Equality of income? Obviously not. Equality of many of the outcomes that actually fill a human day? Far more than we admit.