But aspirations like these are really just pipe dreams in today's ever more unequal society. The "economic upswing" has actually made it more difficult now than at any time in recent history to move your family from Manor Road to Westlake Hills.
Yet the media continues to portray Austin and America as a carefree, wealthy society, even when the numbers show otherwise. An example is the cover story in the latest issue of Newsweek - "They're Rich (And You're Not)." The angle of the article is baffling, but it does contain some clues to our economic reality.
The article presumably expands upon a Newsweek poll where 61 percent of respondents said they've missed the boom and 72 percent feel more social pressure to keep up. Rather than explore why so many are missing out on prosperity or whether social pressure has anything to do with record levels of debt, the article focuses on profiling some of the new, nonconventional, cyber, super-rich. Aside from this tiny minority of Americans, everyone else is painted as jealous, unlucky brats. Although there was no poll question about envy, the cover of the magazine portrays a middle class male in despair. "Everyone's getting rich but me!" he thinks. And such sentiment is dubbed "The Whine of '99."
People shouldn't be whining; they should be fuming. The booming economy has indeed led to lower unemployment, but most people are working harder for the same or less pay. The article acknowledges this, claiming that the work ethic of the past isn't the key to wealth anymore - luck plays an increasing role. But there is no proof that hard work was ever the best route to wealth. Throughout American history two major factors have played a role in becoming rich: luck and the ability to exploit people.
Newsweek, however, seems to portray an America far removed from a past era of economic success through toil and hard labor. "At least when robber barons made their fortunes in the late 19th century," the author writes, "there was general agreement they worked long and hard to get them." It is not clear where the author finds such general agreement, surely not in the city-wide strikes and workers' rebellions of the time. The fact that these men were called "robber barons" should be sufficient to raise doubts about his thesis.
The article is filled with such contradictions. There are numerous statements about Americans feeling richer, but orange boxes highlight statistics on the same page that read, "only 13 percent think there's a good chance they'll ever get rich in their current jobs."
The story should have been about the fact that income distribution is the most unequal it has been since official Census counting began in 1947, and even more unequal than what economists say existed at the early part of this century. Wealth distribution is even worse. Or perhaps the focus could have been on the Luxembourg Income Study that shows that the U.S. has the smallest middle class and the largest proportion of poor people out of all the industrialized countries in the world.
We can't all be Michael Dell simply because wealth does not come from thin air. Wealth is created through work - providing services, building houses, catching fish, teaching children, designing machines. When a few people are making record profits while others are watching the boom pass them by, it's usually the latter who are working harder and longer creating those profits, and the former keeping more for themselves.
Villarreal is a first year law student
