THE MIDDLE CLASS SQUEEZE. New source of Company Mail Apt. 11d has a number of posts on related topics. One, taking issue with Daniel Drezner post on inequality (and referencing inter alia The Two-Income Trap (see also here and here) comments on how costly downtown housing is. New York Deputy Fire Chief Richard Picciotto mentions in his Last Man Down (details or compare prices) the long commute he and his firefighter colleagues and other civil servants face owing to the high housing prices closer to work. A caller to the Rush Limbaugh program made a similar remark about commuting distances in California owing to housing prices, one factor contributing to the recall. Automobile registration fees are either higher or proposed to be higher. (The registration fee increase takes effect October 1.) There is an anomaly here (another of those nagging small problems?,) namely that housing prices diminish with distance from the central business district in proportion to transportation costs, such that a resident ought to be indifferent between paying to live next to the office and walking or living at a distance and commuting. (This version, which perversely closes whenever I open another window, introduces the pi-r-squared notion that the amount of land available at any distance increases with the square of the distance, which has to enter into the bid rent function in a way -- perhaps bigger houses??)

There might be more to the puzzle than meets the eye. Professor Laura correctly notes that there is a price premium to houses in better school districts, which ought to be part of the bid-rent curve. But a colleague active in local politics tells me something more: in the sprawling parts of Greater DeKalb (west and northwest Chicagoland, to those of you east of the Fox River) the zoning boards sometimes mandate larger lots on parcels recently annexed or zoned for development, in order to reduce the strain on school districts and the water system. (There is a whole line of research on whether or not suburban development pays sufficient taxes to provide for the additional government services, which I leave to the reader to find as an exercise.)

Professor Laura also comments here and here on second-wave feminism's effect on women and child-rearing, linking to an Atlantic review of Arlie Hochschild's Commercialization of Intimate Life (details or compare prices) that Milt's File commends, potentially for other reasons. The subtext in all three of the Apt. 11d posts I mention remains the middle class squeeze (I think, more accurately, the yupscale squeeze,) and I offer a bit of related reading. Cornell's Robert Frank wrote Luxury Fever, a lament for the relentless raising of the bottom-end product (we'll argue another day about whether that's profligacy or progress -- the book details and price comparison are enough.) In the course of writing the book he suggested that something along the lines of sumptuary laws or consumption taxes might be of use. U.S.A. Weekend's Jean Chatzky offers a different set of suggestions. I can relate to this: "I grew up in Wisconsin, the daughter of academics. We lived in a modest house on a street filled with kids. Thinking back, there were lots of signs that money wasn't plentiful during most of my adolescence. For entertainment, my parents and their friends had potlucks and bridge nights, alternating houses." She doesn't mention pitching a tent on vacation trips, or five people sharing one bathtub and one toilet. Our neighbors perceived my folks as rich because we had mostly new furniture (not counting the stuff my parents built themselves, or restored) and we kids got some new school clothes each year. No air-conditioned land barge (the SUV can only tow a yacht, it cannot be one) or private bath -- not to mention hot tub -- in Mom and Dad's bedroom or sitting room nobody sat in. Did I mention we were home-schooled? If you check the Milwaukee Public School records you might think otherwise, but we were all reading at the age of three or four, and I knew more computation tricks before I started first grade than I did by the time they finished with me. (Rediscovered most of them, Allah be praised.)

The final 11-d post of interest is a from-the-belly view of work life. I repeat ... there are gains from trade in coming up with alternatives to the tournament treadmill, we will pay you a lot but we will own you, and I bet a mandatory 35 hour work week isn't the quickest way to discover them. (Summer has passed, and with it the "early Friday getaway" rush hours on the expressways leading to Greater DeKalb (or more suitably, toward Wisconsin) but I bet there's some give to the treadmill around the edges, not all of it for family emergencies.)

SUPERINTENDENT'S NOTE: The above post has been revised for content and punctuation on September 30.