They Don't Even Know the Cost of a Loaf of Bread?

Journalist, Arwa Mahdawi, returns to the truisim that the comparatively wealthy always massively underestimate the gap between the rich and the poor (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/series/the-week-in-patriarchy). The latest manifestation is a viral tweet from a Professor at Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania). She asked her class how much the average American makes in a year. The annual fees for Wharton School are $100,000 and the average family income of a Penn State student is $195,000. A quarter of her students thought the average American earned 6 figures a year. One respondent thought $800,000 was about right! The actual average is just under $54,000 per year. One should also note that a) this is the average rather than the, perhaps more appropriate, median (mid-range) value and b) 'income' does not, for many rich folk, only come in the form of wages. Many of the graduates of Wharton School go on to become politicians or captains of industry. Mahdawi also recalls an article in the New York Times, where the then 8 New York mayoral candidates, were asked the median sales price of a house in Brooklyn. The candidates all had had political/commercial experience. One estimate was as low as $80-90,000 and none were near the actual figure of $900,000. This unrealistic understanding of people's finances isn't limited to Americans. The current UK Prime Minister famously described his £250,000 per year salary for a side-line of writing a newspaper column as 'peanuts'. The point Mahdawi is trying to remake is that too many politicians have no idea what it's like to be unable to buy a house/rent decent property, be 'swamped' by student loans or be (in the US) bankrupted by medical bills. It will be interesting to see what happens, in the UK, as the cost of living ratchets up. If politicians can't recognise the common plights of their own poorer citizens, there is little chance of their doing anything effective about it, when they come to power. Fairly obviously, US and UK politicians will generally have zero appreciation of the financial pressures on poorer nations. We can only make progress on the climate crisis/Covid19 pandemic, if they rapidly improve their knowledge. This seems unlikely.