Far & Near: US - A country of contradictions

Robert Louis Stevenson, the great writer, spent the summer of 1880 in California, recuperating from an illness, and it was a time spent writing and reflecting on the New World and its ways. His stay in Mount St. Helena overlooking Napa Valley, America’s famed vineyard country, is recorded in delightful vignettes of everyday life of those parts in The Silverado Squatters. An observation made then cannot but impress a traveller to the United States in our own times, nearly 150 years on. It tells us something about what’s made America world leader by far in most things that matter — even when we quite rightly criticise the US’ serious misdeeds in relation to other peoples — for close to 100 years.

Says the Scottish novelist, “But it was an odd thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the very skirts of civilisation, I should have used the telephone for the first time in my civilised career. So it goes in these young countries; telephones and telegraphs, and newspapers, and advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly bears.” Mind, this was still the era of stage-coaches, with Stevenson making the appropriate surmise that the “cultus of stage-coachman always flourishes highest where there are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed.”

It is just as well to note on America’s Independence Day today that while crime related to greed and race, psycho-crime, and poverty-related petty crime, still find fertile ground in the US, arguably the richest society in the world on any composite index (rather than a PPP-type measure), what truly stands out is the scale of infrastructure that began to be built in this massive way in this massive country — about three times India’s size — from about the time Stevenson paid his visit.

It is not just the building of the roads, the railroad (train system), Steven-son’s “telephones and telegraph”, and massive ports and airports, from the very beginning, but also over this long period their more or less immaculate maintenance that commands attention. But for the truly impressive infrastructure, it is arguable if there would be such wealth and wealth accumulation, the building of national armed might whose political impact is felt around the globe, indeed the building of internal democracy itself although after protracted struggles of ordinary folk, the advancement of science consciously undertaken, the fabrication of an ecosystem of knowledge-creation and innovation, and the concomitant flowering of technology of every conceivable type.

Some aspects of these are visible in countries of Europe too, or in Japan or Singapore or Hong Kong. But let’s not fool ourselves. These are Lilliputian in relation to the US in size, and way smaller in population numbers. Comparisons must be made between likes, not a caricature of likes. As for China, for all its pretensions, it is still a developing country. Precisely because America is so far ahead of other countries, its inner contradictions are visible, jarring, and puzzling.

In the course of a recent visit spread over several weeks, this writer saw many people who live in mobile homes in parking lots by the side of state and national highways. They can’t build or rent regular homes. They have no money. Why so? That’s a deeply troubling question. There cannot, after all, be a shortage of land in this huge country. But, why do they have no money? Are they unwilling to work? Or, does work not pay enough? Or is work not to be had? Or, is it just that capitalism has gone berserk?

Some figures show why people might be resentful. While it seven years since the official end of the “Great Recession”, according to a 2015 Gallup poll, 48 per cent of Americans self-identified themselves as “lower class” in that year. In 2008, this figure was 35 per cent. The same survey says that those self-identifying as “upper middle to middle class” fell from 63 per cent to 51 between 2008 and 2015.

It also appears that for the past decade or so, the current generation of Americans may only expect to be worse off financially and status-wise than their parents. This is reversal of a long-standing trend and denotes being pushed down the class ladder. The top one per cent hold over 20 per cent of the nation’s income, and the rise in incomes of the top 0.1 per cent is almost entirely matched by the fall of income of the bottom 90 per cent of America. The syndrome of “Robin Hood in reverse” has been achieved in part by reducing the marginal top tax rates since the 1960s from 90 per cent to 30 per cent.