George katona, et al., as reported in 1969 in a 1968 Survey of Consumer Finance,a study by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan, asked a sample of American heads of families to estimate their expected income for the year. The number of paleo-poor is not diminishing and may actually increase as automation cuts ever more sharply into the ranks of the young, the old, and the low and middle skill groups. This page brings us to the end of our discouraging view of the last generation's progress in life-styles. I did not give figures here because of the complicated arithmetic and the chapter. A quick general check on my accounting may be made by comparing 1945 and 1965 disposable personal income per capita at constant 1958 prices, as contained in the Statistical Abstracts for the United states.
Disposable income means roughly all wages and profits personally received, less taxes.
Making such allowances, the increment might even be a negative one, unless of course we add the long-term personal credit, which, as I have pointed out in the text, is a true form of income. In my calculations in the text, credit rescued a situation which actually turned into a negative increment over the twenty-year period. Speaking of automobiles, as we do jokingly at the foot of this page, a 1972 government study shows that having a car in America is no joke at all. The money went for gas. The total does not include the eleven new tries that the owner would probably have to buy over the ten-year trip from the assembly line to the junk yard.