THE MYTH OF THE MIDDLE CLASS NOTES ON AFFLUENCE AND EQUALITY

By Richard Parker '68Foreword by G. William Domhoff. New YorkLiveright, 1972. 233 pp. $7.95.

Much like Portnoy's, Parker's Complaint ends, "Then we can begin." The Myth of the MiddleClass has little else in common with the Roth novel. Humorless, its pages pimpled with dollar signs , and percentage symbols and leaden with bitter sarcasm, it is a book one wishes were not necessary.

Parker's thesis is that the popular picture of a huge and affluent middle class in America is a destructive illusion in a land where poverty is unheavy, abated, the distribution of wealth grotesquely topblue and the average worker—whether he wears collar or white—unable to afford the consumer goods so conspicuously offered him.

In a barrage of arguments, some seem jerrybuilt. Parker's historical chapters, for example, are stimulating; he suggests that the socioeconomic structure of the United States of a century ago was much like today's. But his claim that Jefferson was as interested in economic as in political equality is hard to credit, and I do not think he marshals enough evidence for his dismissal of President Kennedy.

Substantive flaws are compounded by technical shortcomings. The lay reader may wonder about the reliability of some of the sources frequently cited. The dramatic statistic that "those with inincome under $2,000 paid an average 44% of their income taxes" is said to come from TheEconomic Report of the President, 1969, but the footnote shows-it was quoted at second hand from a scholar's article. This is an important matter. Like rumors, facts can easily be distorted in successive transmissions.

Choppy writing and slipshod editing also cause trouble. I was irritated most by a mislabeled graph in an appendix and by the following: "To offer one simple example, in 1962 the mean wealth of those earning $15,000-$25,000 was a substantial $63,000; in the much smaller $25,000-$50,000 category, a very healthy $291,000; and in the $100,000 and above bracket, a munificent average—including these very wealthy—of only 1,700,000."

But even if, under these circumstances, the assertion that one-third of Americans live in poverty is unconvincing—at one point "a small rented five-room flat" is lamented as the inadequate lot of a poor family of four—it would be callous to reject Parker's main concerns. His book is documented more thoroughly than A Populist Manifesto, and it covers a less sensational but more serious topic than America,Inc.

For all its faults, then, The Myth of the Middle Clas is a useful and forceful corrective to the notions that technocrats have successfully waged war on poverty and that an economic revolution has favored most Americans with a cornucopia of second cars, color televisions, and educational opportunities. It may be said to prepare the ground for a long overdue national debate: does the United States want economic equality, or has the "Work Ethic" replaced "Equal Opportunity" in our mythology?

Mr Paul Deputy European Editor for the LosAngeles Times/ Washington Post News Service, iswriting a thesis at Oxford on the AmericanPopulist Tradition.