Over the past year, education circles have seen the rise of calls to “Teach the Truth.” They’ve held rallies, taken pledges, and launched social media campaigns. In principle, “teaching the truth” is a swell idea. In practice, the problem is that it’s been championed by teacher unions and progressive groups with a very particular notion of what “the truth” entails. Indeed, their “truth” frequently seems to boil down to claims that the U.S. is a white supremacist “slavocracy,” capitalism is exploitative, and working people can’t get ahead in America.
Look, these truthers are entitled to their views. But the “truth” turns out to be more complicated than they seem to think. Americans do confront real challenges. America has always fallen short of our aspirations in important ways. And it is also true that American life is better and more bountiful than the education truthers are inclined to acknowledge.
On that score, it’s worth pondering a new book which should inform how we teach the “whole truth.” In Superabundance, economists Gayle Pooley and Marian Tupy show just how extraordinarily better off Americans are today than we were even a few decades ago—and how remarkably our well-being has improved over time.
Now, usually, even when economists show how wealth, say, has grown over time, it can be too easy to say, “So what?” After all, those numbers don’t really tell you how much better (or worse) off someone really is. And things can get confusing when we start accounting for inflation-adjusted salaries and prices. To avoid all of this, Pooley and Tupy use the neat trick of translating wages and the cost of various goods into “time prices”—figuring out how long someone would have to work in order to make a purchase at a given time.
To take a simple example, Pooley and Tupy calculate that, a quarter century ago, an unskilled worker in the U.S. earned $7.49 an hour. At that time, 1997, a 42-inch LCD TV sold for $15,000. Thus, an unskilled worker would have to work about 2,000 hours (or 40 hours a week for 50 weeks) to make that purchase. By 2019, the average unskilled worker earned $13.66 an hour and (far better) 42-inch TVs cost $148. In other words, 11 hours would now pay for the purchase that, 25 years ago, would’ve required a year of work.
TVs are a pretty banal example, but Pooley and Tupy offer rafts of others, including breakfast, pickup trucks, air travel, computation, housing, air conditioning, and so on. And when you look at the differences over much longer spans of time, the results start to get truly eye-popping. In other words, even as the population has exploded—nationally and around the globe—we’ve experienced a growing abundance of, well, pretty much every good and service you can imagine. Remarkably, that’s been true not only in the U.S., but throughout much of the world.
Pooley and Tupy discuss the forces responsible, pointing to how societies escaped myopic “zero-sum” assumptions by engaging in free, cooperative trade and embracing (even disruptive) innovation. They note the importance of adopting silver as a common currency, for instance, explaining, “For the first time in history there was a universal means of exchange. That removed the need to barter in long-distance trade, making trade much easier and more profitable.” They note that trade liberalization “allowed industrialization to spread globally. Trade volumes rose, costs fell, and, as reflected in the process of price convergence, markets became global.”
America’s current ailments and shortcomings are part of the truth. But so, too, is grasping the extraordinary abundance that today’s youth have inherited—and that even a family of modest means in 2022 has access to transportation, communications, health care, plumbing, food, and entertainment that would’ve exceeded the wildest dreams of a Renaissance monarch. Oh, and understanding the forces that helped produce these gifts is, also, part of “teaching the truth.”
In the end, it’d be a lot easier to take “teach the truth” at face value if the self-proclaimed truthers seemed more interested in exploring the whole truth, even the bits that don’t comport with their politics.
