The wealthy middle

On manufactured housing, bargains with the Devil, and why countries should try to grow richer and more just at the same time

Using time worked as a means to standardize purchasing power over time, an intrepid researcher finds that the minimum-wage worker today can buy a lot of consumer goods for about the same time-based price as a median worker 100 years ago. The big exception is in housing: Both rent and purchase prices are much, much more expensive than they were three or four generations ago.

■ Today's median worker lives not all that differently (based on the time-worked measurement) than the top 1% of 1924. Again, housing is the outlier -- it's much more expensive today, and that should hold our attention. If housing is a third or more of most household budgets, and if that price is burdensome for half or more of the population, then we need an honest reckoning with the problem. Zoning in many places should be liberalized, restrictions like minimum lot sizes should be reformed, and we should do much more to encourage transformational methods of homebuilding like manufactured housing.

■ But it's important to recognize that improvements in material standards of living are important supports for making progress on non-material principles, as well. A materially secure society can put much-needed energy into matters like securing civil rights.

■ Wealth doesn't make a society morally strong, but it helps to eliminate distractions and stresses that permit the unscrupulous to appeal to lesser public instincts. The ever-present risk, though, is that material wealth can lead to a self-satisfied sense of distraction from important matters of character. That's the gamble upon which the Communist Party has bet so heavily in China: They're desperate for GDP growth as a substitute for recognizing the natural rights of their citizens. That's what makes current sustained downward trends in GDP growth such a problem for the regime.

■ Economic growth and progress in building the moral character of a nation have to go hand-in-hand. It's no use being rich but awful, and it's not sustainable to be highly just but poor.