IN THE 1950S, THERE WAS A MOVEMENT in American design called “Populuxe,” which was a portmanteau of the words “populist” and “luxury.”

The Populuxe movement in architecture and design sprang from the realization that industrialization had made possible the wide availability of products and services once reserved for a wealthy few — everything from cars and airplane travel to home appliances and single-family homes. It is worth remembering that until well into the 20th century, the hoi polloi lived either on farms with primitive amenities or tenement housing in cities with their own miseries and deprivations.

America’s mass consumer society can trace its beginnings to the early 20th century, but it really hit its stride in the years after the extended disruption of the Great Depression, with its widespread privation, and World War II, with its rationing and bond drives. After the war, factories that had played an essential part in the U.S. victory were converted back to civilian use and set to work producing vast quantities of the items middle-class Americans now take for granted — washing machines, televisions, radios, hair dryers and so on.

There was something more subtle going on as well: the rise of the idea that the benefits of economic growth ought to be widely shared — for reasons of basic fairness, yes, but also through an economic insight bought at a terrible price in the crisis of the 1930s. The insight was this: booms financed by credit always end in tears, because debts eventually need to be repaid. The more torrid the credit-fueled boom, the more terrible the eventual hangover. The hangover from the credit boom of the 1920s was enough to literally starve a shocking number of Americans to death.

Booms fueled by increasing wages (as long as the raises didn’t exceed productivity gains in the aggregate) tended to end in a much more manageable way — an eventual modest uptick in inflation as demand overheated, to which the Federal Reserve would respond by raising interest rates to dent demand; a short, sharp recession while demand slackened and prices moderated; and finally a quick recovery when the Fed lowered interest rates again to spur demand.

The late, great Molly Ivins used to joke that if Bill Gates walked into a bar, the average (i.e., mean) wealth of the patrons would suddenly be well over a billion dollars, but it would still be Bill Gates and 50 bums. The U.S. in the last 30 years has become that imaginary bar writ large: We have the three million richest Americans (the storied “1 percenters”) wallowing in wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, while 300 million of the rest of us bums wonder why we haven’t had a raise in 30 years.

The statistics are stark: Adjusted for inflation, the economy has grown by roughly 250 percent in the 33 years since 1980, while the median wage has increased by about 10 percent. For comparison, in the 33 years before 1980, the economy grew by roughly the same amount, but in that period the median household income doubled. (Speaking of that word, “median,” it is a better indicator of how the vast bulk of the population is doing, since it indicates not the total income divided by earners like “mean” average measures but rather the earnings level where half the population is earning more, and half less. In the Bill-Gates-walks-into-a-bar model, the mean wealth skyrockets, but the median wealth barely budges.)

The great irony of all this is that an economy where the wealthy have a smaller share of economic growth and the rest of us a larger share results in vastly richer rich people in absolute terms, since demand is higher, resulting in faster growth, resulting in the rich having a slightly smaller share of a much bigger economic pie. Everyone wins — workers, merchants, capital.

But that’s not the way the rich want it, for reasons that seem to be intrinsically human. Sociologists have run experiments in which they offer a subject one of two alternatives — a smaller portion of a more abundant good (usually pie, candy or some other treat) or a larger share of a smaller pie. Most people choose the latter, against their own objective self-interest.

This very human tendency is what is holding the economy back — there is not enough buying power in the vast bulk of Americans’ pockets to support anything more than meager growth in the economy, since rich people tend typically to save (rather than spend) the majority of any marginal gains in wealth. Non-rich people, on the other hand, are far more likely to spend any gains in wealth and thus add demand to the economy, since they will use the money to buy necessities (or near-necessities) they previously lacked the means to acquire.

Which is to say, I think it ought to be an explicit goal of our economic policy makers to grow the median income and increase demand in the economy, putting the U.S. on the path to sustainable and widely shared prosperity.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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