Downton Abbey fans: do you think the divide between the rich and poor in the series is extreme? Take a look in our current backyard.
Like millions of people around the world, I am a fan of the British television drama Downton Abbey. Although set in England between 1912 and 1920, the characters mirror the American elite during the era (in fact, one of the characters is a nouveau riche American heiress from Cincinnati).
The historical divide between rich and poor as portrayed in the series may seem anachronistic to modern viewers, but in reality the social and economic chasm in the United States is as extreme today as it was a century ago. Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate economist, has written that we have experienced a “great economic arc from high inequality” during the Gilded Age “to relative equality and back again.” The Occupy Wall Street movement uses the slogan “We are the 99%” to emphasize the growing income and wealth inequality between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population.
In 1915, when the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Mellons dominated American industry, the richest 1% of Americans earned roughly 18% of all income. Today, the top 1% account for 24%. In 1928, one year before the global financial crash, the wealthiest 1% owned 892 times more than 90% of the nation’s citizens. Today, the top 1% owns 976 times more than the entire bottom 90%.
Despite the similar historical disparity between rich and poor, the quality of life for ordinary people today is generally far superior to their ancestors in the first quarter of the 20th century. Life was hard for most people and medical science was relatively primitive. In 1920, infant mortality rates were 82 per thousand for white children and 132 for blacks (today the rate is respectively 6 and 14 per thousand). At the beginning of the ‘20s a man could expect to live 56 years and a woman’s average lifespan was 58. As depicted in Downton Abbey, ordinary people worked at least six days a week; after World War I, American blast furnace workers generally put in 84-hour work weeks.
Lacking big screen plasma TVs, iPods, Twitter and other modern gadgets and social media tools, those poor servants in Downton Abbey had to spend their off-duty time reading, sewing and conversing. . . . on second thought, perhaps they WERE better off than people today!