ARCHITECTURE

filtered through an economic sieve; doing so presupposes
the “economy” as an isolated phenomenon that takes precedence
over all else.
1.2.3 Historicizing Data
Closer to the current policy-makers themselves,
underlining this focus in its 2015 Annual Report, the Executive
Office of the President’s Council of Economic
Advisors (CEA) highlights income inequality as a fundamental
analytic required to understand and promote what
the Obama Administration has called “middle-class economics.”
14 The Economic Report of the President, intended
primarily for a Congressional audience, is released annually
by the CEA in order to explain, contextualize, and
justify the Administration’s domestic and international
priorities for fiscal policy. In 2015, alongside productivity
and participation, according to the CEA, inequality is a
force to be reckoned with for those in charge of managing
the United States of America’s “well-being.” 15
In this, their mandated frame of mind, the CEA
has characterized “A Brief History of Middle-Class Incomes
in the Postwar Period” as fitting neatly into the following
stages: “The Age of Shared Growth (1948–1973),”
“The Age of Expanded Participation (1973–1995),” and
“The Age of Productivity Recovery (1995–2013).” 16 Representative
of dominant narratives on inequality today in
both its content and its structure (where a “brief history”
of four pages ostensibly provides sufficient context for a
414-page manual of contemporary policy assessments and
proposals), a very particular story emerges in the CEA report—one
that has been told and retold in different forms.
Upon further inspection, however, its limiting assumptions
are revealed.
1.2.3.1 “The Age of Shared Growth (1948–1973)”
The report’s periodization picks up in 1948, just
two years after the CEA was founded as part of the Employment
Act of 1946. This was precisely the time when
the idea of “the economy” was beginning to be discussed
at all as an object of analysis in its own right. 17 [See HH:
1933] This is an unlikely coincidence, since, as the CEA
indicates, the newly networked field of technology, materials,
and presumptively shared understandings of the
middle-class road ahead facilitated a veritable explosion
of growth for the U.S. economy immediately after the war.
In response to unprecedented rates of urbanization,
and framed by a perceived communist threat abroad,
the federal government crafted a series of policies meant
not only to manage but also to distribute this growth—both
spatially and financially—among the members of the aspirational
middle class. 18 Though the 1956 Interstate Highway
Act is the most well known, the U.S. Housing Act of
1949 was perhaps the most comprehensive and far-reaching
of these efforts. Principally known for its emphasis
on the reform of urban housing conditions through slum
clearance and urban renewal programs, the act also drastically
increased the federal backing of mortgage insurance,
ramping up the government’s long-standing policy
of homeownership promotion above other types of housing
tenure [See HH: 1944, 1949, 1952, 1962, 1973, 2009]. 19
By most economic measures (although importantly not by
others) income inequality was soon at an all-time low. 20 In
the 1950s and 1960s, Americans’ average annual incomes
increased. However it was the lowest-earning fifth of families
that experienced the highest average increases, while
the top 5 percent experienced the lowest. 21 The homeownership
rate, accordingly, increased from 44 percent in
1940 to 55 percent in 1950 and 62 percent in 1960. 22 Due
in part to this expansion of access to homeownership, the
share of total wealth held by the least wealthy 90 percent
of the population increased from 22 percent in 1940 to 32
percent in 1976. 23
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