Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

Although the real costs of most of the most essential things we need to buy—housing, education, healthcare—have increased by 50 to 200 percent, since 1981 we haven’t had high inflation, when the prices of everything go up noticeably from season to season and even month to month. It’s too bad your wages haven’t gone up for forty years, goes one common argument from the right and well-to-do concerning the economic condition of the American majority, and that pensions and unions and millions of good jobs disappeared, but, hey, haven’t we let you eat cake? That is, they say, in all seriousness, that income inequality isn’t as bad as it looks because some things, like milk and eggs, are actually less expensive now, and TVs are gigantic and inexpensive, and all the other stuff at the Walmarts and dollar stores is so cheap, thanks to Chinese imports. As two influential papers by a pair of University of Chicago economists put it in 2009, the “prices of low-quality products” that “poorer consumers buy” such as “ ‘cosmetics,’ ‘toys and sporting goods,’…‘wrapping materials and bags,’ ” and “squid frozen filets,” fell during the 1990s and 2000s.*1