Talk Amongst Yourselves (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

I love Arkansas Business readers. I’m approaching my 17th anniversary as editor of this publication, and I’m pretty good at intuiting what stories will interest you, but I’m still pleasantly surprised by your responses. You are such a delightfully unpredictable group — and certainly not the bastion of groupthink that the uninitiated might assume.

I know this, because I hear from readers — and not just the online commenters who vent their spleens with the fierce courage of anonymity. (Our website, ArkansasBusiness.com, allows comments under screen names, but I’m not at all sure it’s a net positive in the marketplace of ideas.)

The readers I love most are the ones who engage with me privately, using not just their own names, but also their company names and their titles and personal details. They typically don’t want their comments published, but they trust me enough to give me the benefit of their thoughts on topics of mutual interest. I’m flattered by their willingness to engage with me and consider it a great compliment to the work we try to do here, imperfect as it is.

Sometimes these comments are the direct result of things I have written in this space. Last week’s column on income inequality (“Hogs Get Slaughtered”) inspired messages from both the bleeding hearts and the tough-love advocates — none of whom seem to have any brilliant new solutions, but at least they are thinking about an issue that is bubbling over into public life. (Intractable problems are intractable for a reason.)

That column went to press on June 23. Twenty-four hours later I would have included Brexit — the British vote to exit from the European Union — along with Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as evidence that income inequality was beginning to motivate the stagnant middle class. But when I wrote it, I really didn’t think the Brexit side would win — continuing my near-perfect record of wrong political predictions.

One of my correspondents graduated from a public high school in a rural part of the state (is that vague enough?), went to college and then found success in business. And several members of his small graduating class did the same. “They don’t apologize for being in the top 1%, I can assure you,” he wrote.

The top 1 percent in Arkansas has annual income of about $250,000 a year and upward, and this reader knows how that’s done: by becoming “a well-paid professional and we know who they are and how one gets there.”

Now, I would never suggest that anyone apologize for success — unless, of course, your “success” is achieved through predatory means (payday lenders, Trump University, that sort of thing). But there’s another point to my friend’s life story that can’t be ignored but seems to be unappreciated: He is now in his mid-70s.

Someone who finished high school in the late 1950s — possibly a segregated one, although I didn’t inquire about that — could go to college for hundreds of dollars a year. That translates to less than (often much less than) $10,000 a year, including room and board, in 2016 dollars. And anyone with a college degree was virtually guaranteed a comfortable middle-class income or better.

Even law school, the ticket to becoming one of those well-paid professionals, was cheap in the early 1960s — between $2,000 and $4,000 a year (for tuition alone) when adjusted to 2016 dollars, according to research by the Association of American Law Schools.

Even my correspondent’s own children probably finished college at least 20 years ago, and nationally the average tuition for in-state students at public colleges has nearly tripled during that time — after adjusting for inflation. Needless to say, salaries have not kept pace, not even for the college graduates who face decades of debt that their grandparents never dreamed of at 22.

People who are in the top 1 percent, like many Arkansas Business readers, don’t feel this as keenly because there is never any question how their children’s educations will be paid for.

I truly love our readers. You open my eyes and my mind every day. If you haven’t done so recently, I encourage you to do some personal research. Talk to your young hires about how much college debt they have. Quiz your older workers about how their children are paying for the educations that their future employers are counting on. Ask yourself how different your life would be if you were starting out today rather than 20 or 30 or 50 years ago.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.