By David K. Shipler
Last
week, Janet Yellin, former chair of the Federal Reserve, gave an upbeat assessment
of the pre-pandemic US economy. “Very fortunately we started with an economy
that was healthy before this hit,” she told the PBS NewsHour. “The banks were in good shape, the financial
system was sound, Americans at least overall on average had relatively low debt
burdens.”
But how “healthy” was that economy,
really? How healthy is an economy whose workers have so little savings that
they can’t make the rent after missing just a couple of paychecks? How healthy
is an economy whose small businesses have so little cushion that they face
almost instant obliteration when their cash flow is disrupted? How healthy is
an economy where hourly employees performing many essential services earn so
little that they have to go to work sick to keep their jobs? And how healthy is
an economy whose housing costs force millions to cram into overcrowded homes in
polluted slums replete with high stress, malnutrition, asthma, diabetes, heart
problems, and other chronic disease?
“There’s nothing fundamentally
wrong with our economy,” said Fed chairman Jerome Powell in March. It was
“resilient,” he said in February. Yellin concurred, citing the old good news in
her hope that the “economy will recover much more speedily than it did from any
past downturn.”
Recover for whom? The experts look
at conventional measurements, which painted a picture of prosperity before
COVID-19. The unemployment rate last September hit a fifty-year low, at 3.5
percent, and the rate for people without a high school diploma dropped to a new
low of 4.8 percent. The GDP had been growing within the range considered
ideal—2 to 3 percent—and Powell reported a rising willingness of employers to
hire low-skilled workers and train them.
However, alongside the bright
figures on unemployment and job creation, consider a competing set of numbers
from before the pandemic: The
poverty-level wages for those who harvest our vegetables, cut our Christmas
trees, wash our cars, cook and serve our food in restaurants, deliver groceries
to our doors, clean our offices, and even drive our ambulances. The 14.3
million households (11.1 percent) uncertain that they could afford
enough food, and the 5.6 million families (4.3 percent) where at least one
person has had to cut back on eating during the year. The 14.3
percent of black children with asthma, double the rate in the
population overall. The 20
percent of children living in crowded homes shared with other
families or three generations of their own, and the 50 percent of urban
children who have lived in those conditions by age nine.
