Good Things and Hard Things

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, December 08, 2025

 

One of the great social tensions of our time is the occasional disconnect between the world’s long-term economic trajectory—which is excellent—and the occasional disappointment or downturn in our immediate local conditions.

 

The economic arc of human life is the sort of thing that can be easily observed if you have the eyes to see it. Never mind the big, dramatic stuff—i.e., the fact that there was something very close to zero percent economic growth for a couple of hundred thousand years until the British and the Dutch invented capitalism and, with it, the modern world—you can see it in the little things, too. You can (as I have recommended in the past) read The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) with economic eyes and ponder the fact that a mysterious figure thought possibly to be Europe’s wealthiest man astounds his guests by serving two different kinds of fish, one from Russia and one from Italy, at a dinner party in Paris, having made extraordinary efforts to do so. When the Count self-deprecatingly observes that the Romans had done much the same thing in bringing live fish from Ostia to the capital, a guest observes that this was a small fraction of the distance between Paris and Italy, to say nothing of Russia. The Count concedes the point but asks: “What would be the use of living eighteen hundred years after Lucullus, if we can do no better than he could?” The 19^th century was, in the sweep of human history, the day before yesterday, and the apex of material progress was that, in only the better part of two millennia, a very rich man in Paris could do a little better than a very rich man in Rome had.

 

I thought of that scene once again as I watched the video for Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” released in 1983. My oldest boy likes music, and his tastes are a little bit all over the map: He likes Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and the “Goldberg Variations,” but he also really likes Sesame Street music, which meant that in a total of 24 hours of minivan driving over the Thanksgiving holiday, I got a heaping helping of secondhand Elmo and the like. (“Caribbean Amphibian,” with Jimmy Buffett, is pretty good.) Billy Joel, an excellent exemplar of the musical middle, is about halfway between Sesame Street and the good stuff, in my estimate, so we’ve been listening to his songs from his ersatz-Four Seasons era: “Uptown Girl,” “The Longest Time,” etc. My guy likes those doowop-adjacent harmonies, as do I.

 

A few things stand out about that “Uptown Girl” video: One is that Christie Brinkley was really, really pretty—even prettier than maybe you remember—and a really, really mediocre dancer. Another is that break-dancing was a great novelty, still, at least for the sort of people who bought Billy Joel records. But, because I have the kind of eyes I do, what stands out to me is that when Brinkley’s unobtainable “uptown girl” arrives at “downtown man” Billy Joel’s gas station, she does so in a chauffeur-driven 1958 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith limousine, the rear window of which she ... cranks down by hand, because even though Packard had offered a sedan with power windows as far back as 1941, the innovation remained a rare luxury or an added option until the end of the 20^th century. Today, of course, you cannot buy a mainstream automobile of any sort that doesn’t have power windows, for the same reason that you have to go out of your way to buy a mobile phone that doesn’t have features that were science fiction only a few years ago, enabled by processing power that once, not long ago, was reserved to supercomputers. It took me some doing to find a car I liked (short of a Porsche) with a manual transmission. (I may be shiftless, but not in that way.) You don’t have to be the Count of Monte Cristo to serve two kinds of fish or exotic delicacies from far abroad at your dinner party—you just need to live near a Walmart. That progress is invisible to many modern people, especially to modern Americans—and especially especially to modern Americans who have a political and ideological investment in the idiotic and indefensible belief that there has been no economic progress for a generation or two or three, or that Americans working in factory jobs in the 1950s or 1960s were better off than Americans working blue-collar jobs today. I know that I can sound like the last living veteran of the Civil War when I talk about this stuff, but I was very amused to read that a judge has ruled that the lack of air-conditioning in Texas prisons amounts to unconstitutional cruelty—an argument that did not occur to any of us at my Texas high school, a brick building dating from 1901 which, in the 1990s, still did not have air-conditioning. Our assumptions about what is normal, what is tolerable, and what is desirable change so quickly, and with so little social friction or active thought, that we hardly notice them unless we stop to think about it—and who except a pointy-headed commentator has the time to do that?

 

In only three or four lifetimes, the capitalist world went from a situation in which most people lived in conditions that would have been more or less familiar to a serf from the Dark Ages to the one with Bel-Air tailfins and refrigeration and widely available antibiotics, and then, in less than the course of a single lifetime, we went from the age of TV dinners and Pan-Am to the age of the iPhone, AI, and robot taxis. Goodness knows I have my aesthetic bones to pick with all of that: Give me a London taxi driver with “The Knowledge” over some poor lost terrified New York City rideshare driver who doesn’t know where Central Park is because he was stuck in traffic in Luanda or Rawalpindi six days ago—GPS doesn’t give a for-hire driver everything he needs. When I hear people discussing whether they’d go back in time to kill Adolf Hitler before he had a chance to launch his career, I sometimes wonder the same thing about Steve Jobs and the iPhone—not that I’d murder the guy (though many of his subordinates wanted to!), but I might talk him out of it. But, even accounting for these de gustibus trade-offs—or even for the very real and much more significant trade-offs, such as increased anxiety and sexual dysfunction in the generation that grew up in the iPhone world—things are moving, and have been moving, in the right direction, at least in raw material terms. A lot of people get to eat now who didn’t get to eat before, and only the well-fed turn their fat little noses up at that.

 

But Americans are not used to economic hardship, even of the relatively mild and short-term variety. One of the reasons Donald Trump lost his election in 2020 was the fact that real wages (meaning wages adjusted for inflation) were cratering in the fourth quarter—not only was the average American not better off than he’d been in the second quarter, he was making about $17 a week less in real terms. Real wages continued to plunge under Joe Biden, whose YOLO-spendthrift tendencies, enabled by congressional Democrats and more than a few loose Republicans, and he was, in turn, shown the door. Here is a fun fact: In the third quarter of this year, real weekly wages were, down to the dollar, precisely where they were when Donald Trump got the boot in 2020. Which is to say: So far, the Trump-era recovery has managed only to get wages back to where they were when Americans fired the guy the last time around. (Readers will please mentally insert here all my usual longstanding caveats regarding the superstitious beliefs about presidents and the economy.) The problem, in no small part, is that nominal wage growth (i.e., the number on the paycheck) continues to be undermined by persistently high inflation—inflation that not only has been too high but that has in recent months trended even higher, rising from 2.3 percent in April to 3 percent in September. An inflation rate of 3 percent may not sound like much, but persistent 3 percent inflation over the course of a decade would mean that a worker who had been earning $1,000 a week would be earning the equivalent of $741 a week after 10 years. A worker who got a 3 percent raise every year would be no better off under that scenario than he had been at the beginning—the number on his paycheck would be a little bigger, but inflation would have taken all the real gains.

 

To make things worse, inflation has been persistent in the relatively small things we spend money on every day—e.g., groceries, where inflation is even worse than it is in the overall market—while inflation in the big things—houses, college tuition, health care—has been climbing way faster than wages for a long time, way before the economic dislocations associated with the COVID-19 epidemic and the government overreaction to it. Overall inflation in the Trump era has remained high for a number of reasons, many of them related to the Trump administration’s policy preferences and those of the compliant congressional Republicans who do the administration’s bidding: lots of spending, lots of debt, and what sure as heck looks like a partially successful pressure campaign to keep the Fed from raising interest rates enough to bring inflation down to its target level. But inflation in housing, college tuition, health care, and a few other sensitive and critical goods has been higher for longer as a result of policies that have been even more foolish: artificially constrained supplies (particularly in housing), increases in demand driven both by demographic and economic forces, and a flood of cheap money (years and years of low-interest mortgages, subsidized student loans, and tax-advantaged insurance spending) to make the economic mud Americans are trudging through that much thicker and deeper. This has been particularly depressing for the kind of young people who expect to be upwardly mobile and whose agonies are attached to disproportionate social and political influence: They took on debt to attend colleges they could not afford and graduated into an economy with disappointing real-wage growth and unaffordable housing, with health insurance costs that remain burdensome despite the grievously misnamed Affordable Care Act. If we do not hear very loud complaints from the poor, it is because they are used to feeling poor—but when the middle to upper-middle classes start to feel poor, there is going to be trouble afoot.

 

Add in a poisonously large dose of historical-economic illiteracy and nostalgia—those “This is what they took from you!” clowns who would break down in nonstop tears if they actually had to endure two weeks at a 1957 standard of living, to say nothing of an 1857 standard of living, and who could not be made to do the kind of work most Americans did in 1920 except possibly at gunpoint—and you end up where we are: at a dangerous political moment.

 

The good news is that our main economic problems can be mitigated through fairly straightforward policy changes. The bad news is that nobody wants those policy changes to be made, because they would mean reduced government benefits, higher taxes on the middle class as well as on the affluent, less access to subsidized credit for higher education or buying houses, and a period of economic adjustment that probably would be at least as painful as the one Americans went through at the end of the Jimmy Carter years and the beginning of the first Ronald Reagan term, when a relatively responsible governing class acting under the leadership of Fed chairman Paul Volcker (who heroically blew smoke from his Antonio y Cleopatra Grenadiers and the occasional ​​Partagas at the elected rabble throughout congressional testimony) screwed its collective political courage to the sticking place and did the needful thing.

 

As a matter of pure political calculation, it is worth keeping in mind (should anyone in Washington feel the unaccustomed stirring of political courage) that while Americans in the 1980s sure as heck did not enjoy the process of fixing the inflation problem they really, really enjoyed having fixed it, and President Reagan went from being a basement-dwelling Gallup poll bum in 1982 to winning a 49-state landslide (recount Minnesota!) in 1984, largely on the strength of economic recovery: Real GDP growth topped 7 percent going into the 1984 election season. Average real GDP growth in the Reagan years was more than half-again as much as in the first Trump term or in Obama’s eight years, and more than under Joe Biden, when the economic figures were boosted by the post-COVID recovery.

 

In much of public life, as in much of private life, the good thing comes after the hard thing. But you cannot get to the good thing without the hard thing. The alternative is to persist in the uncomfortable, frustrating, disappointing mediocrity of the present situation—and how’s that working out for everybody?

 

Words About Words

 

I very much enjoyed this New York Times column about one man’s hunt for a piece of costume from a “Planet of the Apes” movie: “I Can’t Stop Thinking About a Primate’s Bathrobe. How Can I Find It?” I would advise the editors over at the New York Times that unless the Geico gecko is more formal in his leisurewear than I expect, all bathrobes are primates’ bathrobes—the primate species include H. sap. That’s right: Your momma is a primate.

 

A non-facetious question: In what sense is Cheryl Hines a “devoted D.C. conservative”? In what sense is she—Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a conservative of any kind? Her husband is a left-wing lunatic, and the man he works for generally abjures the label “conservative,” one of his few truthful habits, given that Donald Trump is no kind of conservative at all. It would not be entirely unfair to use conservative as contemporary shorthand for Republican-aligned nut, I suppose. But I think the term, and its meaning, are worth fighting for, like the difference between masterly and masterful or forte “FORT” vs. forte “for-TAY.”

 

And Furthermore ...

 

How long have I been writing about Democratic “moral victories”? Twenty years, maybe? From Slate:

 

Democrats Just Lost an Election by 9 Points. Why Are They Celebrating?

 

A moral victory is worth zero votes in the House, but it may well be a sign that the party is in for a good year in 2026.

 

What in the name of Beto O’Rourke, patron saint of Democratic “moral victories,” are these clowns thinking? A few more moral victories like that and Republicans will rename the moon for Donald Trump.

 

In Closing

 

I was gratified by the reaction to my Thanksgiving column. In a sense, the first part of this column is a Thanksgiving column, too: It is easy to take for granted—even to be contemptuous toward—the ways in which our lives have improved materially in past decades. I am not much of a neo-medievalist and do not have much use for the heretical (Marcionite!) notion that the material world is cursed and in constant competition with the higher, spiritual things. Material privation can be a tool of spiritual formation, as can other forms of suffering approached the right way,  but poverty—poverty unchosen, forcible poverty—leads to spiritual deformation as often or more often. We generally are not better off poorer—not materially, not politically, not spiritually. There are many, many good things to say about the Dominicans and their vow of poverty—but that is a very different kind of poverty than what one sees in rural India or Honduras or, indeed, a few pockets of our own country. American poverty is unusual, globally and historically, because it is largely a non-economic phenomenon, being mainly a manifestation of mental, social, and spiritual dysfunction. (Here I mean real poverty, not relative poverty.) Which is to say, American poverty does not present a path toward spiritual improvement but rather presents evidence of the need for improvement, spiritual and moral poverty being persistent presences even in a country in which there is more than enough to go around.