The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans / Summit on the Economy

well, thank you, thank you everyone, welcome to Neal and I want to jump right into the conversation. I'll start by saying that this piece that I believe may be showing behind this, but if not, you know we only officially posted this a week ago and it's already gotten over a hundred as of this morning, three thousand likes on Facebook, which which always suggests an article that is resonating widely and was incredibly brave. In fact, let me start by pointing out something else, which is that Neal for this, on occasion I have used a pocket square that has a change in it, so it very, very appropriately reflects my financial circumstances through that as well, but you talk, I want say that you know that the title is

shame

or you know that you are talking about

shame

. quality of talking about finances and you talk about how people are actually more likely than Americans, in particular, American men to be more willing to talk about their erectile dysfunction than they are about their financial circumstances, so I guess two questions, one is: do you know what prompted it? overcome your own shame, come forward very bravely and talk about this in a way that has resonated widely and then we'll get into the exploits at some length, but what has the response been?

So I'm brave or I'm very stupid, but what? What prompted me was this: I mean, I've had financial difficulties almost my entire life. You wouldn't know it if you looked at me or looked at my resume or my 1040, but when I read the Fed's survey on home economics. Last year a statistic came up and it was that they asked me if I had a four hundred dollar emergency, would I have the four hundred dollars to pay for that emergency? I now knew my own circumstances and often would not have four hundred. dollars, but I figured I was in an extremely small minority and the statistic was that 47% of Americans, 47% would not have $400 of liquid assets in their checking account or whatever to pay that $400 and that surprised me and I What prompted me to write this article?

If you know my work, you know that I almost never write personal articles. I write about culture. I write about Hollywood. I write about politics, but I never write about myself. But I thought maybe I could make a small contribution to those people who are suffering like I am suffering, but suffering in silence and I will just tell you one thing: I get a lot of emails, people are actually looking for my email address, I which is not the easiest thing to do in the world. I get a lot of emails from your own emails, but I received one in particular last night.

People tell me their stories, but I received one in particular that seemed to sum up exactly why I wrote the article and was extremely rewarding for me. he said thank you thank you thank you now I know that I am NOT alone, I want to talk more about the answer and I must say that the preface is to say most of the answer that we have posted online in our notes section. There have been a huge amount of people sharing their comparable stories, some of which are quite touching and the comments sections are always a swamp of negativity and horror, so I want to get to the positive things and then I want to get to what this means for the stay. of the

economy

in general, but first the main criticism, Iseman and I avoided going into the comments, but one criticism that we knew we received was: you are not crying poverty and yet you are living, you know. you've made certain decisions you live on Long Island you have a professional class life you know you claim you're not trying to keep up with the neighbors and yet you know you're legitimately living paycheck to paycheck, but there's a stipulation that 47% of Americans who can't afford to make ends meet there are people like you or who live a

middle

or upper

middle

class lifestyle and have that Miller and then those who don't.

I wouldn't agree. with you, I think you know that I'm living a middle class lifestyle, possibly a modern middle class lifestyle. One of the statistics that I cite in the article, which was another thing that surprised me is that several years ago, USA Today did a study on What It Would Cost to Live a Middle Class Existence Now they leveled it out geographically because there is a clear difference between living in New York and living in Iowa, but they used what we would generally consider to be middle-class kind of reference points. live on $250,000 at home, an annual vacation, a car, send your kids to college, pay your medical bills, and what they determined was that a middle-class existence using those kinds of benchmarks, a middle-class existence would cost one hundred and thirty thousand dollars and we know that one in eight Americans makes $130,000, so when you say I'm living a middle-class existence, I'm not living a middle-class existence by that standard.

I drive a 1997 Toyota Avalon with 160,000 miles that I inherited from my father, I never go out to eat I say these things in the piece and they are all true I am a film critic but I hardly go to the movies anymore we never take vacations and I mean we have never taken vacation in the room I say ten years, but it's probably closer to 15, we live a very frugal existence, we didn't live extravagantly before and we certainly don't live extravagantly now, you know, I may live in the Hamptons, but I live in the Hamptons full time like the poor people and those of you know that community you know where I'm talking about I don't live there during the summer like the rich there are two Hamptons The Hamptons are basically a colony like Africa you know I mean you basically have to the rich the people who come and live, you know, are taken care of by the poor people.

I'm not, I'm not in the service community. I'm a writer, but I'm basically part of that bottom group full time and if you were to look at my house or look at my circumstances, no one who's seen that would ever say boy, this guy is living large and just wasted a ton of money. I know there have been people who have said you don't read the article carefully enough, yes I spent some money because I had to send my kids to college. You know, I had to pay for my health insurance because I'm a writer and it's not paid for by the people who employ me to write the articles I had.

I have to pay gigantic taxes because they pay me advances that are quite significant but must be amortized over several years, but the federal government no longer has income averaging, so they take a gigantic portion of my money and then expect I have that money. It lasts me the six, seven, eight years that it takes me to write a book, so you know, these are the kind of circumstances that not only affect me, but everyone, you know, the funny thing is about this god when I receive these letters, these emails or whatever. I talk to people on radio shows, everyone has a story and the story is not that I lived too high and now I'm paying the price the story is that I had a financial emergency the story because I got divorced the story is my spouse died, you know, those are the stories that are told in this country and I hope this is not true for the majority of the people in this room, most of whom I assume are extremely august, but not me, but many of the people in this country According to statistics, almost half live paycheck to paycheck because you don't save for a rainy day, as I say in the piece, we live inside a storm, there is not an emergency every year, there is an emergency almost every day, my car no.

I don't work my dog ​​is limping, you know there is something that hits you every day and you have to pay for it. I have a roof that needs repair, it's going to cost me $35,000. I'm not even insured for water damage, where? Am I going to get $35,000 to repair that roof? Tell me I have no idea and I have to say here that Neal is being modest because he is a blast and this is detailed in the article, but he is the author of five, I think five. Many of the books were one that came out and was published yesterday.

I could add one of which was cast by Martin Scorsese in Hollywood and I don't think I ever did, but you know he gets the money. I was a television personality for about five more years. This is what you know, he is a great man. I write idiotic copy that is not proportional to what has been earned, yeah, well, I won't say it, I mean, I'm not going to talk to him, I would say this because I think this speaks more broadly. number I work seven days a week last year I wrote thirty pieces thirty pieces and a book thirty pieces and a book and I taught and I lectured and I wrote a script that had options I did all that and even with all that even with you know, modification of mortgage loan, it's hard to make ends meet, I'm making ends meet, I'm not saying no, I don't have any major debt, I'm paying beyond that, I'm not accumulating more, but it's hard to do. end of the month and this is something that many of you know that the professional class in America doesn't understand, they just don't understand it and I'm telling you this here from a member of the professional class who works hard every day. one day of the year there are no days off for me that's literally true I'm not speaking you know in hyperbole it's literally true and I barely make ends meet I do it, but I barely make ends meet that's the country we live in and it's a country in which half of the Americans cannot afford the basics of a middle class life they are angry yes they can express it you know they express it blaming China blaming Mexico blaming Obama because in financial impotence they do not talk about your impotence and in America, we don't talk well about these things, I'm talking about it, I'm ashamed, I feel humiliated, but I felt, as I said before, that I could make a small contribution, a very small contribution, provide something.

It's a very small consolation in telling my story because other people don't feel like they can tell theirs well. So actually, I'm not even going to ask you to answer this because it could become a segment of a completely separate panel, not just two days long. Summit on the state of media and content generation. You know, one criticism has been: you chose to be a writer and you drew. You were very successful. The

economy

had become increasingly more challenging as we and many of my colleagues live every day, but let me and then I was actually going to want to talk about some of the many, you know, I have a sheep here of positive comments here , but I'm not really going to go into details, I don't think I have time, but stories about people who, like you were saying, sometimes it's a spouse who died sometimes it's an unforeseen illness sometimes it's literally a bad time to make a decision again someone who chooses, you know, following the advice of what everyone tells them to leave their career in 2008 and then they move to Florida and the economy crashes and they can't find another job and they end up moving there.

Sometimes it's a big recession, you know, it's a lot of little things, but sometimes it's a big thing that erases it. Calculate your net worth, so you have nothing and people have called me and written me about it, but this started before the Great Recession. I mean, the Great Recession obviously disappeared. I mean, it's 1973. Okay? I mean, we know. We've had wage stagnation since the late '70s, but I'm talking about The Economist. I'm not an economist and I don't even pretend to have experience, so I wouldn't be in this situation. I'm ignorant, but The bad economists I talked to said, you know, in the early '80s we started to see the harbingers of this situation and you know wage stagnation is a perfect picture.

I work in the gig economy. I work piece by piece, so I sign a book, but for a while. Today's writer, you know I'm making exactly the same money for an article and I write for some pretty big magazines, including Atlantic, which I did 2025 years ago to adjust that for inflation and you're seeing that's my wage stagnation, my wage stagnation It doesn't belong to anyone. pay more than they paid 20 or 25 years ago, that's part of being a writer, it's a terrible profession, you do it because it's an addiction, not because it's a profession, I'm addicted to it because most writers are, but then you translate that. in other people who work in a factory or in a service job or whatever and they don't make more money but their expenses increase, their expenses increase and their income doesn't increase and that's where the rubber lies the way well and translating this now to what this means for the economy in general, you have a great quote that I'm going to bastardize, it's a member, a friend of yours or a New York cartoonist or someone who said or Norton or maybe real.

New Yorker cartoon, but he said you know it used to be like that in life if we did what's called smoothing consumption, we all go through our careers and there are times when you have higher or lower incomes and you smooth your purchases accordingly and the quote was, you know. It used to be that we went through hard times, but now the hard times have become constant, yeah, that cartoon of waitress Sarah Kaplan in The New Yorker, you know, we thought it was just a bad streak, it turned out to be our life and that is.

How do I conclude the article by saying: you know, we think we're going through a bad patch,Guess what I don't expect for anyone in this room, but for me it's my life and for probably half of America, about half of America, it's not a bad streak. It's their life, their salaries will skyrocket next year or ten years from now our magazines will suddenly start paying me more money. I can guarantee you they won't. Our publishers will pay me more for my next book. No. you are not going to pay me more and translate that back to the man or woman who is teaching now that you know that the unions are being destroyed and there is no influence or the person who sells or the person who works in a factory, their wages They are going to shoot themselves to cover their expenses.

Now it's cosmic. We live in a bad streak. It's our life. And you know, I talked about helplessness. There is viagra for sexual. impotence but there is no viagra for financial impotence your struggle and there is work and there is hope but hope diminishes and I can tell you too so you say correctly that you are not an economist you talk to many economists for this PA Zig And I think some of them are in this room and they are extremely helpful and I thank you if the reality is that life now is for many of us at least forty-four seven percent of us, if not, I mean, I'll tell you.

I know many of my colleagues at the magazine related powerfully to your article because if it's not exactly their situation, they realize how close they are. What do economists say about how we got here and how much we got out of? is the decline in union power. To what extent is it due to globalization and relocation? To what extent is it simply the gigafication of the economy? Increasingly disposable, what caused X minus four and how do we get out of this? Can we get out of this okay? I would be speaking out of my experience and I can't pretend you know that in a room of experts.

I really don't want to speak outside of my experience. I mean, I know the people that I talked to, I mean, a lot of people talk about credit and the availability of credit and how people start swimming in credit because you know the credit traders were kind of like and I anticipated the mortgage traders of subprime mortgages, but that's not the whole story and even the economists that I talked to would say that's not the whole story and even wage stagnation is not the whole story, there's a lot of things that feed wage stagnation so there are a number of factors you know I can speak to the outcome because I am the outcome I am a living antidote but there are so many different things that collaborate to cause something of this magnitude and again you know I have emphasizing magnitude is great and one of the reasons I think the piece is getting the response it is getting is because magnitude hasn't been addressed in the first place and people, like I said before, don't feel comfortable expressing it. and when you put those two things together, what do you get?

I think you get our political situation, you get a lot of angry and frustrated people who are displacing their resentments and their frustrations and a host of other things that are really the problem, but that's what you know if we live in a bad economic patch. , we live in an angry streak politically and people just don't know how to articulate or aren't comfortable articulating what may really upset them. You know, when anger clearly emanates to some degree from the Economy and anxiety Yes, I want to make sure that we leave time for questions at the end, but let me go back to where we were talking about the beginning, which is shame and your bravery in moving forward, You say in your article like I said, you know. people are more comfortable talking about you, you know about erectile dysfunction, but you haven't even told them that you know your closest friends and now here you are putting it on national Medicaid and I'm curious what you think that shame stems from and what has been the response. of your male friends, should we start a Kickstarter campaign like now to fund?

He kneels then, but know the only thing I asked for, no sympathy, no pity, none of that, you know, this is my situation, I got into it, I stayed in the room a lot of times you know people don't always know it. read closely enough and they say, well, you know, he's asking for this or that. I, you know, look, I probably have a lot better than most people in this country because I do have. a sliver of hope that I'll get a bigger advance for the next book or I'll get more work or something will happen and I hold on to it and sometimes it's right sometime it's off but I'm better off than most of my countrymen Americans and what is the source of the shame that cable people are distinctively American.

I think it's a posture. I'll tell you, I mean the polls show it and I'm sure the people in this room know it. Americans are always there, first of all, we live in a winning and losing country so let's start there, we have a political candidate who has divided the country into winners and losers and believe me, he didn't have to do that because most of us think That way, whether we like it or not, we think we are a loser or a winner and how do we determine those things? We determine winning and losing by the amount of money we win.

I mean, this is a notorious consumer country and no one wants to be on the losing side of the divide, which is one of the reasons it's so embarrassing, so you know, I think you know it kind of starts there, They don't talk about it because doing so means you're responsible. and this is the country I was about to say in terms of polls. If you look at surveys from Germany, England, France or other industrialized countries, a much smaller percentage of people will answer the question: Do you know if you are responsible for financial difficulties? that you are suffering, a much smaller percentage will say yes than Americans have always believed and frankly have been taught to believe that everything depends on you if you are struggling financially it is completely your fault because anyone can succeed in this country if you work hard. hard enough.

Well, I'm going to tell you right now and I am resentful of this phenomenon. Yes I look angry. I'm angry. You can't work harder than me. It's not true and you want to know something if you talk to tens of millions of Americans who work hard and don't live beyond their means, it's not true and it's about time we deprogram ourselves to believe that, oh, if we just work hard we'll get everything. what we want we will have that middle class existence is not true and I am also living proof of that that is a powerful note to end on in a kind of setup for future panelists to speak but I want to leave a little time for questions so that we can have two or three if they are very, very fast, so there, ma'am, thank you.

Hi, I'm Shelly Porges, co-founder of Hillary Entrepreneurs. I'm the one framing this conversation because you know financial impotence versus sexual impotence and anything that almost suggests it's a male thing, no, and yet we know that women live at much lower economic levels in the country, so the 47% that you cited, who live below the median, how many, do you know, what proportion of them are women, whether heads of households or individuals. That's a great question and let me say, let me address it generally, you know, I call it financial impotence because I think it helps address the issue, but you raise a very important, very important issue, this is a disease and I say that in the article that covers almost all demographic groups, obviously, the male and female races are known, although Hispanics and blacks suffer greatly. much more about our economic dysfunction than a person like me, but here's the interesting thing: it affects education.

I should also add, but it also affects the economic strata. If you look at the data, the data shows that people who, by any standard, would be considered upper middle class, you mean Annamaria Lizardi did a study with several of her colleagues. I hope he's in this room. She was a great help to me and she is doing very valuable work that showed a quarter of people earning between 100,000 and 150,000. The dollars could not afford a $2,000 emergency, so this is something that affects a very broad section of Americans and if women suffer, they suffer more than men, more than that, so you are absolutely right, we are time is running out, but there are so many hands raised yes You can keep your question to ten seconds or less and keep your answer to 30 seconds or less.

We'll get one more response right there with your piece of paper in the air. My name is Bea Young, thank you for your introduction and your candor. one way to do it, I think that's what we as a society need, but I'm wondering if you have any research or data that you can say. You know that today we are talking about economics, but if there is no freedom of justice, the economy will not grow because all your essay. it will be taken away from you whether it is your individual or your company so without that capital or asset in the economy it simply will not grow so ok free key information or data research will become meaningless so I wonder If you can have that information that you can actually share with us. because we know that many people are struggling.

I have a dream and I believe I can achieve it. I can build there. I have vacations with my family almost every year. I plan it, but now all those dreams are just bubbles. Good thank you. I guess that goes down without broader social justice. Freedom can, can, she can, everyone, how can we have them in Las Vegas as a trigger of opportunity, but you know, get an economy where Americans can have vacations and other things? Well that's that's that's beyond my pay grade that's in your pay grade I told you so we'll leave it to the rest of us figure that's a key thank you very much and thank you Neil thank you