Economic growth makes Graceland less impressive

If you are of the conventional wisdom about income trends over the past few decades, you know that almost all of the gains from economic growth have gone to those at the very top of the income distribution. The super rich were getting super rich and they left us to deal with our stagnating incomes.

Except that what you know might not be true. First, studies by Vincent Geloso, Phillip Magness, John Moore, and Philip Schlosser show that inequality has not changed as much as many think. (you can read the summary of their article Here). Second, the evidence for inequality and the difficulty of comparing what a dollar can buy now with what a dollar can buy in the past obscure some of the ways in which we have become more equal over time. You can verify this by going to Graceland.

My family lived in Memphis for six years while I taught at Rhodes College from 2006 to 2012. During this time, I only visited Graceland, Elvis Presley’s famous mansion and Memphis tourist attraction. extraordinary – once It was as bright as you’d expect, but in many ways the economic growth meant it wasn’t quite as impressive in 2012 as it would have been when Elvis lived here in the 1970s and 1980s. Firstly, just a photograph of the place does not look like anything. What especially if you are familiar with luxurious modern country houses. The TV room in particular is odd. In the 1970s, it was very impressive to have three televisions. In the 2020s, when everyone basically carries three TVs in their pocket and backpack – phone, laptop, tablet – that’s a lot less. What was once the unimaginable luxury of Elvis is now available to homeless people walking around with smartphones.

The furniture is interesting, as in many other old houses. Eighteenth and nineteenth century furniture would be quite impressive and ornate for the time, but honestly, would you trade your armchair or sectional sofa for chairs that the elite sat on in the 1800s or 1970s?

The same goes for Graceland cuisine. There were a lot of things, Elvis had have banana pudding, a pack of pepsi, and meatloaf ingredients on hand. He could afford to pay someone to look after it all for him. With ubiquitous shopping and delivery services like DoorDash, GrubHub, Uber Eats, and Shipt, we have an army of software-armed professionals who can get us whatever we want, when we want it.

Graceland shows us who has benefited from modern economic growth. Here is how Joseph Schumpeter described it in a famous passage written in 1942:

Undoubtedly, some things are available to the modern worker that Louis XIV himself would have been glad to have, but could not have, such as modern dentistry. On the whole, however, a budget of this level could gain little from capitalist achievements. It can be assumed that even the speed of movement did not matter much for such a very worthy gentleman. Electric lighting is not a great boon to someone who has enough money to buy enough candles and pay servants to maintain them. It is cheap cloth, cheap cotton and viscose fabrics, boots, cars, etc., that are typical achievements of capitalist production, and not, as a rule, improvements that would mean a lot to a rich person. Queen Elizabeth had silk stockings. The capitalist achievement is usually not to produce more silk stockings for queens, but to make them available to factory girls in exchange for a steadily diminishing amount of effort.”

Let’s update this for the modern world. Doordash, GrubHub, and Shipt aren’t much help for those with enough money to pay someone to keep their refrigerator stocked. Streaming services and smartphones are not a big boon for someone who can afford three TVs. If he were alive today, Elvis’ subscription to Disney+ would be no better than mine (as far as I know). Cheap commercial air travel, Uber and Lyft are no big boon for someone with a private jet, a pink Cadillac, and a twenty-car garage. SodaStream isn’t much of a boon for someone who can afford to pay someone to have their fridge filled with Pepsi. Google, Wikipedia, ChatGPT, and Bard—all of which I used while writing this article—are not much help to those who can afford to hire research assistants, copywriters, and editors. Disney+ is not a big boon for those with a private cinema.

Allegedly, American officials wanted Soviet officials to see Graceland because it showed what a land of opportunity it was. Even a poor kid from Tupelo, Mississippi, could make it in the Land of Opportunity. However, the real “capitalist achievement” is not Graceland. The thing is, compared to the everyday life of the average person in 2023, Graceland is not that impressive.

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Art Carden is a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is also an adjunct professor of economics at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama and a fellow at the Independent Institute.

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