On this trip I think we should notice it… to see if, in that strange separation of what man is from what a man does, we may have some clues as to what the hell has gone wrong in this twentieth century…
— from ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ by Robert Pirsig
Pagosa Springs residents woke to find a light dusting of snow in their yards, and a noticeable chill in the air. We assume that the white stuff may have encouraged the departure of some of our ‘snowbirds’ — the part-time residents who spend the summers in Archuleta County and then head off, in the early or late fall, to Phoenix or Tucson or other places where snow is an endangered species.
The presence of part-time residents is not unique to Pagosa Springs; they flock to various Colorado towns and cities in the summer to escape undesirable summer weather in regions closer to the Equator — think, 115 degrees in Phoenix, or unpleasantly hot and humid Houston. No one can blame the snowbirds for fleeing summer heat for an idyllic setting in the Rocky Mountains with 80-degree summer days and cool summer nights.
Nor can we blame them for packing up and heading south when the snow arrives. But the snowbird lifestyle does have a noticeable effect on the Pagosa Springs economy. Most of the snowbirds are retired, almost by definition, because you can’t easily hold down a steady job in your permanent place of residence… if you have no permanent place of residence. You can’t easily be raising a family, or get involved in community projects that last longer than 6 months at a time.
I doubt the city of Phoenix — population 1.6 million — feels a huge impact as the snowbirds return in the fall, or when they leave in the spring. The town of Pagosa Springs, on the other hand? Population of the entire county is maybe 13,500 in the springtime, before the snowbirds arrive, and increases substantially through the summer months. No one has really measured how big the increase might be; the snowbirds generally remain all summer, but they get all mixed in with the tourists who come for maybe a week at a time.
We really don’t know whom we should blame, during the summer months, for the lousy cell phone service and slow Internet here in Pagosa.
In 1974, when Robert Pirsig wrote his bestselling inquiry into the human race’s love-hate relationship with technology — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — he framed the discussion with a motorcycle trip from Minneapolis to Montana with his 11-year-old son Chris. A trip, in other words, from a big city where Pirsig worked editing computer manuals, through some of the most ‘rural’ landscape in America.
‘Desolate’ might be an even better word than ‘rural.’
Pirsig’s once-popular book rambles down various intellectual ‘back roads’, using his motorcycle — and his motorcycle trip across rural America — as a metaphor for the apparent conflict between scientific ‘progress’ during the 20th century and a renewed interest in humanism and spirituality that arose during the 1960s.
Many of us were feeling confused about that stuff by 1974, and Pirsig’s book made a valiant attempt to sort out the reasons for our confusion.
Pirsig didn’t know it at the time — none of us knew it at the time — but the nation was just beginning its own journey into a new economic landscape. Between the end of World War II and 1974, the US economy had grown by leaps and bounds, and one of the key effects was the growth of the American Middle Class. There are various and conflicting ways to define the Middle Class, and I’m not going to settle the argument in this article; I’m sure my readers have their own ideas of what the term means.
My focus in this article series isn’t meant to be on America as a nation, but rather on the part of America that lives outside our growing urban areas. Rural America. More particularly, rural Pagosa Springs.
As it turned out, the steady upward climb of the American Middle Class began to taper off rather suddenly around 1974, as shown in this graph, which I’ve shared before in Daily Post editorials:
What we see here (using inflation-adjusted dollars) is that, from 1948 until about 1972, the increases in American compensation (for private sector, non-supervisory workers) tracked closely with our steadily increasing national productivity.
Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, offers an analysis of what we are seeing in the chart above.
From 1948 through 1973, the hourly compensation of a typical worker grew in tandem with productivity. That can be seen in Figure A [above], which presents both the cumulative growth in productivity per hour worked of the total economy (inclusive of the private sector, government, and nonprofit sector) since 1948 and the cumulative growth in inflation-adjusted hourly compensation for private-sector production, nonsupervisory workers (a group comprising over 80 percent of payroll employment).
After 1973, productivity grew strongly, especially after 1995, while for the average worker‚ compensation was relatively stagnant.
The nation as a whole, in all class levels, had been experiencing unprecedented prosperity following World War II. After 1973, however, productivity (dark blue line) continued to improve steadily — while the real growth of workers’ compensation (light blue line) stayed essentially flat.
This divergence of pay and productivity meant that our nation’s workers did not benefit from the growth in America’s productivity in the same way the nation’s wealthiest citizens benefited. The American economy could seemingly afford higher pay, but was not providing it to the average worker. But a whole generation of young people who began raising their families in the 1970s felt like they were riding the crest of an economic wave. Financially, the young Middle Class that kept Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on the bestseller’s list for a decade were experiencing a level of relative wealth and material comfort that their parents had barely dreamed of.
The snowbirds who visit Pagosa, and the retirees who’ve settled in rural Pagosa over the past 25 years, are largely members of that same Middle Class from the 1960s and 1970s. It’s a Middle Class that — according to recent reports — is now being “hollowed out.”