A living wage
18th February 2009
Megan McArdle prods our collective memory.
Our memories are distorted by two things: first, the tendency of all cultures to focus on their own outliers (many fewer people work for silicon valley startups in real life than in either our entertainment, or the popular imagination), and second, the fact that the people who have written about the period are abnormally likely to have come from successful families who pushed them through an education. Their memory of a well-appointed blue-collar childhood in a nice suburb on Dad’s generous steelworker wages endures; few memories of a straggling blue-collar childhood as the child of a factory janitor do, because those kids were less likely to go to college and become people of letters. The successful and educated are disproportionately likely to be represented in all parts of our written and spoken culture, from man on the street interviews to letters to the editor. History really is written by the winners.