The Decade of Greed that Wasn't
for Forbes Magazine (November 3, 1997)
By Dinesh D'Souza

OUR INTELLECTUAL ELITE have frequently been out of tune with the rest of America, but rarely so blatantly as in the way they have portrayed the 1980s. The 1980s have gotten a bad rap as an "era of greed," a "me decade," in which self-aggrandizement was in and altruism was out. Oliver Stone, who has never let the facts get in the way of a good story, reinforced the elite stereotype at the popular level with the film Wall Street, in which the villainous Gordon Gekko proclaims, "Greed is good." At a loftier level, social critic Barbara Ehrenreich titled her book on the Reagan period The Worst Years of Our Lives.

Some of the symbols of the 1980s seem to confirm this assessment. Dynasty was a top-rated TV show, and Madonna made her reputation as the "material girl." Novels like Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities profiled the self-indulgent lifestyle of the young urban professional, the so-called yuppie.

The quintessential yuppie wanted to be an investment banker, not a social worker. His or her motto was not "Bread for the world" but "Poverty sucks." Some were avid consumers of recreational drugs.

But is self-indulgence really new? Were the 1980s yuppies more selfish than all those young men who fled to Canada or Sweden so that the Vietnam War wouldn't interrupt their lifestyles of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll? More self-indulgent than the young people of the 1920s immortalized by F. Scott Fitzgerald? Prosperity quite naturally produces self-indulgence. What would you call Bill Gates' $40 million mansion? Or the $300-a-night luxury hotels where it’s tough to book a room in 1997? Why would the later Reagan years, with a rising stock market and steady economic growth, be different? They were made to seem different largely because the media and most of the intellectuals didn't enjoy seeing capitalism vindicated.

Let’s examine just two of the anti-Reagan myths.

Myth number one: Reagan presided over vast giveaways to the rich.

In fact, during the 1980s, the affluent paid more in federal taxes than ever before. Even though the top marginal tax rate declined from 70% to 28%, the proportion of taxes collected from the top 1% of income-earners went from 18% of all revenues in 1981 to 28% in 1988. The top 5% of earners bore 35% of the tax burden in 1981. In 1988, Reagan’s last year in office, they paid 46%. Meanwhile the tax share of middle- and lower-income Americans declined.

Myth number two: The affluent forgot about their obligations to the less-well-off during the Reagan years.

In reality, the well-off not only paid more in taxes but also gave more in charity. The Reagan era saw the greatest outpouring of private generosity in history. Americans, who contributed around $65 billion (as measured in 1990 dollars) to charity in 1980 gave more than $100 billion annually by the end of the decade, a real increase of 54%. The average American, who gave $340 to charity in 1980, raised his or her contribution to $486 in 1990.

The rate of increase in charitable contributions, economist Richard McKenzie calculates, was greater than at any previous time in the postwar era. Moreover, he observes, it was greater than the growth of expenditures on personal extravagances like jewelry purchases, eating out and health club memberships.

Nor did Americans merely contribute money: More people volunteered their time for churches and civic groups than ever before.

This uncontested fact is conveniently omitted from all the descriptions of the 1980s as an era of greed.

Deeply embedded in American liberalism is a sense that only the government can properly help the less fortunate. The pundits missed the point Reagan made in his 1981 inaugural address: "How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient?"

Isn't it interesting? Luxury consumption is way up in the 1990s, yet no one speaks about this as a decade of greed.

(See also: Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became and Extraordinary Leader)