Yes, poor people have color TVs [View all]

[Recursion]

I started down this road in a different thread and kind of wanted to muse on this for a minute.

First off, yes: poor people in the US have color TVs. Poor people in Dharavi have color TVs (they're more common than water taps). Wherever people have electricity, they tend to get color TVs.

Nielson estimates that 115.6 million households (out of 115.8 million) have television sets. But color TV is a luxury, right? Not really. When the US switched from NTSC to ATSC in 2009, the barebones analog signal black and white TVs used to use (the color information is sent in a sideband modultion that black and white TVs don't know about) went away, meaning that now any black and white TV has to have the ATSC converted to NTSC and then converted to analog -- a process that is often more expensive than the original TV itself. New black and white consumer TVs are essentially not manufactured or marketed. Poor people have color TVs because that's what's manufactured and sold.

But that particular explanation ignores a larger point, which I think conservatives get exactly backwards. Color TVs used to be a luxury because they were expensive to make. They're very cheap to make now. The US doesn't make them much anymore (I think Zenith was the last US-owned major TV manufacturer, and LG bought it a while ago), but other industrialized countries do (and the US makes the machinery that they use to make them, so there's that). TV manufacturers saw an available market, and produced an affordable product for it. This is a good thing, and one of the few things capitalism does pretty well. As manufactured goods get cheaper and more plentiful, real standard of living increases (not that the color TV is a great example of improving standard of living, but it is definitely a small example of that). This leads to what seems paradoxical to a lot of conservatives: how can you call somebody "poor" when their quality of life is in many ways much better than that of a rich person a few decades ago? Color TV! Smartphones! etc.

Well, take smartphones, come to think of it. 10 years ago, there were Blackberry's and Treo's, and that was about it (and 10 years before that there weren't either of them). If you were very rich or had a job that required them, you had one; otherwise you didn't. Now you can go to a Boost Mobile outlet and pay $100 for a decent Android phone with a pre-paid plan.

Ah, there it is: a pre-paid plan. Androids are sometimes seen as "poorer" than iPhones, possibly because of that. Poor people can often afford the iPhone itself, but don't have the credit needed to get a postpaid plan from AT&T or Verizon. Which gets to my larger point:

The gap between the wealthy and the poor in industrialized countries is less about manufactured goods bought than it is about services consumed. There are still obviously some fantastically expensive "status" items, but for the most part most people have mobile phones, televisions, and computers (something like 99%, 98%, and 85% of households, respectively). A sign of richness now is having a good gym membership, bespoke clothes, eating at fancy restaurants, etc... all things that specifically don't get cheaper with automation (or at least not much cheaper).

This, I think, is a first hint of what poverty in a post-scarcity economy looks like. The ability to afford many of the same physical things the rich do without the security of knowing you'll be able to keep it for very long. (When I was very poor a few years ago I would buy a cell phone used, activate it and add some minutes, use it, and then sell it on Craigslist when I needed money to eat; same with my computer).

Unfortunately this will probably only get "worse" from a conservative standpoint: more and more things are going to get cheaper and more widely available. And I think that really does bother some on the right: they want a life in poverty to be as hard as possible (from their perspective -- wrongly -- they think that will motivate people to "stop being poor" or something). Personally, like I said I think overall it's a good thing that people can now afford things that used to be out of reach.

But the services gap is only going to keep getting worse. This is part of the problem with health-care prices; it's a service-intensive industry, and hopefully ACA will do something to make health-care services more available. But there are a lot of other services that the poor are priced out of, like car repair (just keep the beater running), and particularly troubling is education (public schools aren't "free" if it costs too much to live in the neighborhood they serve, to say nothing of tutors, etc.).

But then again maybe it doesn't have to be that way. Take manicures: that used to be a service for the well-to-do only, but that's changed in the past several decades, and now if you look on any immigrant-heavy street in any city in north America, you'll see nail salons everywhere -- there was an interesting study out of California showing that Vietnamese immigrants' opening salons had resulted in a large increase in the number of salons everywhere. And, in fact, with WalMart and Walgreens opening up clinics with nurse practitioners in every store, as well as the FQHC model expanded by the ACA, an idea very like the multitude of small, low-overhead standalone nail salons may be coming to health care. Could a model like that come to education? Would we want it to?

Anyways, I just wanted to get that off my chest. The physical objects a person owns at a given moment are no longer the sure signs of wealth or poverty that they were even a decade or two ago, and they're the wrong way to understand wealth and poverty now. Services are a much more important sector to look at, imo.