It’s been quite a few years since I was “good on stairs” — blithely bouncing up them while scarcely noticing they are there; or gamely mounting them without having to pause at the first step to collect my powers. So I long ago noticed the application of Murphy’s law in this context. Call it the First Law of Escalators: If a location sports an up escalator and a down escalator, and one of them has gone out of service, it will almost certainly be the up escalator that is downed.
Yesterday I had one of those bad stair days. Not one, but two broken escalators, one at the grocery and one at the subway, both dutifully conforming to the First Law. And it got me to thinking that the law has a broader application.
Studies have repeatedly shown that the U.S. (together with the U.K.) has the weakest economic mobility of any first world economy. In these studies, “Mobility” is defined as the percentage of people who move into a different income quintile from their parents’. It also appears, at first blush, that the general sense that mobility has declined of late is false — those percentages have been remarkably stable over the last fifty years or so.
But that’s just the first blush. Because income inequality has steadily increased over that same period, “staying in” the same lower or middling quintile means that, in terms of relative income and of social status, you have been losing ground. If you’re in the top quintile, you’ve been gaining it.
So we may derive Murphy’s Second Law of Escalators: When an economy is broken, the up escalator stops working, but the down escalator keeps on humming right along. Our economy has been broken for nearly half a century, and the Second Law has been inexorable. The up escalator won’t start running by itself. It needs fixing, a redistribution of income downward as massive as the redistribution upward that got us here.
Senators Warren and Sanders, with a few others, have shown up in their coveralls to report for repair duty. It’s going to take a massive effort, local and national, to provide them with the necessary cadre of co-workers to get the job done. Until then, there’s no way that America is going to be able to live up to its self-admiring reputation as a nation that is particularly good on stairs.