I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s — although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today — nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.”

There was militant labor union organizing going on, especially from the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are frightening to the business world — you could see it in the business press at the time — because a sit-down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. The idea of worker takeovers is something which is, incidentally, very much on the agenda today, and we should keep it in mind. Also New Deal legislation was beginning to come in as a result of popular pressure. Despite the hard times, there was a sense that, somehow, “we’re gonna get out of it.”

It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

On the Working Class

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back. If you’re a worker in manufacturing today — the current level of unemployment there is approximately like the Depression — and current tendencies persist, those jobs aren’t going to come back.

The change took place in the 1970s. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of the underlying factors, discussed mainly by economic historian Robert Brenner, was the falling rate of profit in manufacturing. There were other factors. It led to major changes in the economy — a reversal of several hundred years of progress towards industrialization and development that turned into a process of de-industrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued overseas very profitably, but it’s no good for the work force.

Along with that came a significant shift of the economy from productive enterprise — producing things people need or could use — to financial manipulation. The financialization of the economy really took off at that time.

On Banks

Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college. That changed dramatically in the 1970s. Until then, there had been no financial crises since the Great Depression. The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

And it was egalitarian.  The lowest quintile did about as well as the highest quintile. Lots of people moved into reasonable lifestyles — what’s called the “middle class” here, the “working class” in other countries — but it was real.  And the 1960s accelerated it. The activism of those years, after a pretty dismal decade, really civilized the country in lots of ways that are permanent.

When the 1970s came along, there were sudden and sharp changes: De-industrialization, the off-shoring of production, and the shift to financial institutions, which grew enormously. I should say that, in the 1950s and 1960s, there was also the development of what several decades later became the high-tech economy: Computers, the Internet, the IT Revolution developed substantially in the state sector.

The developments that took place during the 1970s set off a vicious cycle. It led to the concentration of wealth increasingly in the hands of the financial sector. This doesn’t benefit the economy — it probably harms it and society — but it did lead to a tremendous concentration of wealth.

On Politics and Money

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle. The legislation, essentially bipartisan, drives new fiscal policies and tax changes, as well as the rules of corporate governance and deregulation. Alongside this began a sharp rise in the costs of elections, which drove the political parties even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector.

The parties dissolved in many ways. It used to be that if a person in Congress hoped for a position such as a committee chair, he or she got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, they started having to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead, a topic studied mainly by Tom Ferguson. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector (increasingly the financial sector).

This cycle resulted in a tremendous concentration of wealth, mainly in the top tenth of one percent of the population. Meanwhile, it opened a period of stagnation or even decline for the majority of the population. People got by, but by artificial means such as longer working hours, high rates of borrowing and debt, and reliance on asset inflation like the recent housing bubble. Pretty soon those working hours were much higher in the United States than in other industrial countries like Japan and various places in Europe. So there was a period of stagnation and decline for the majority alongside a period of sharp concentration of wealth. The political system began to dissolve.

There has always been a gap between public policy and public will, but it just grew astronomically. You can see it right now, in fact. Take a look at the big topic in Washington that everyone concentrates on: The deficit. For the public, correctly, the deficit is not regarded as much of an issue. And it isn’t really much of an issue. The issue is joblessness. There’s a deficit commission but no joblessness commission. As far as the deficit is concerned, the public has opinions. Take a look at the polls. The public overwhelmingly supports higher taxes on the wealthy, which have declined sharply in this period of stagnation and decline, and the preservation of limited social benefits.

The outcome of the deficit commission is probably going to be the opposite. The Occupy movements could provide a mass base for trying to avert what amounts to a dagger pointed at the heart of the country.

Plutonomy and the Precariat

For the general population, the 99% in the imagery of the Occupy movement, it’s been pretty harsh — and it could get worse. This could be a period of irreversible decline. For the 1 percent and even less — the .1 percent — it’s just fine. They are richer than ever, more powerful than ever, controlling the political system, disregarding the public. And if it can continue, as far as they’re concerned, sure, why not?

Take, for example, Citigroup. For decades, Citigroup has been one of the most corrupt of the major investment banking corporations, repeatedly bailed out by the taxpayer, starting in the early Reagan years and now once again. I won’t run through the corruption, but it’s pretty astonishing.

In 2005, Citigroup came out with a brochure for investors called “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances.” It urged investors to put money into a “plutonomy index.” The brochure says, “The World is dividing into two blocs — the Plutonomy and the rest.”

Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that’s where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way outperforming the stock market. As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don’t really care about them. We don’t really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but other than that they essentially have no function. These days they’re sometimes called the “precariat” — people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Only it’s not the periphery anymore. It’s becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing.

So, for example, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, at the time when he was still “Saint Alan” — hailed by the economics profession as one of the greatest economists of all time (this was before the crash for which he was substantially responsible) — was testifying to Congress in the Clinton years, and he explained the wonders of the great economy that he was supervising. He said a lot of its success was based substantially on what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If working people are insecure, if they’re part of the precariat, living precarious existences, they’re not going to make demands, they’re not going to try to get better wages, they won’t get improved benefits. We can kick ’em out, if we don’t need ’em. And that’s what’s called a “healthy” economy, technically speaking. And he was highly praised for this, greatly admired.

So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat — in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this.

If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long, hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories. And there are a lot of things that can be done.

Toward Worker Takeover

I mentioned before that, in the 1930s, one of the most effective actions was the sit-down strike. And the reason is simple: That’s just a step before the takeover of an industry.

Through the 1970s, as the decline was setting in, there were some important events that took place. In 1977, U.S. Steel decided to close one of its major facilities in Youngstown, Ohio. Instead of just walking away, the workforce and the community decided to get together and buy it from the company, hand it over to the work force, and turn it into a worker-run, worker-managed facility. They didn’t win. But with enough popular support, they could have won.  It’s a topic that Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd, the lawyer for the workers and community, have discussed in detail.

It was a partial victory because, even though they lost, it set off other efforts. And now, throughout Ohio, and in other places, there’s a scattering of hundreds, maybe thousands, of sometimes not-so-small worker/community-owned industries that could become worker-managed. And that’s the basis for a real revolution. That’s how it takes place.

In one of the suburbs of Boston, about a year ago, something similar happened. A multinational decided to close down a profitable, functioning facility carrying out some high-tech manufacturing. Evidently, it just wasn’t profitable enough for them. The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness. I don’t think they want things like this to happen. If there had been enough popular support, if there had been something like the Occupy movement that could have gotten involved, they might have succeeded.

And there are other things going on like that. In fact, some of them are major. Not long ago, President Barack Obama took over the auto industry, which was basically owned by the public. And there were a number of things that could have been done. One was what was done: reconstitute it so that it could be handed back to the ownership, or very similar ownership, and continue on its traditional path.

The other possibility was to hand it over to the workforce — which owned it anyway — turn it into a worker-owned, worker-managed major industrial system that’s a big part of the economy, and have it produce things that people need. And there’s a lot that we need.

We all know or should know that the United States is extremely backward globally in high-speed transportation, and it’s very serious. It not only affects people’s lives, but the economy.  In that regard, here’s a personal story. I happened to be giving talks in France a couple of months ago and had to take a train from Avignon in southern France to Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris, the same distance as from Washington, D.C., to Boston. It took two hours.  I don’t know if you’ve ever taken the train from Washington to Boston, but it’s operating at about the same speed it was 60 years ago when my wife and I first took it. It’s a scandal.

It could be done here as it’s been done in Europe. They had the capacity to do it, the skilled work force. It would have taken a little popular support, but it could have made a major change in the economy.

Just to make it more surreal, while this option was being avoided, the Obama administration was sending its transportation secretary to Spain to get contracts for developing high-speed rail for the United States, which could have been done right in the Rust Belt, which is being closed down. There are no economic reasons why this can’t happen. These are class reasons, and reflect the lack of popular political mobilization. Things like this continue.

Climate Change and Nuclear Weapons

I’ve kept to domestic issues, but there are two dangerous developments in the international arena, which are a kind of shadow that hangs over everything we’ve discussed. There are, for the first time in human history, real threats to the decent survival of the species.

One has been hanging around since 1945. It’s kind of a miracle that we’ve escaped it. That’s the threat of nuclear war and nuclear weapons. Though it isn’t being much discussed, that threat is, in fact, being escalated by the policies of this administration and its allies. And something has to be done about that or we’re in real trouble.

The other, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps towards trying to do something about it. The United States is also taking steps, mainly to accelerate the threat.  It is the only major country that is not only not doing something constructive to protect the environment, it’s not even climbing on the train. In some ways, it’s pulling it backwards.

And this is connected to a huge propaganda system, proudly and openly declared by the business world, to try to convince people that climate change is just a liberal hoax. “Why pay attention to these scientists?”

We’re really regressing back to the dark ages. It’s not a joke.  And if that’s happening in the most powerful, richest country in history, then this catastrophe isn’t going to be averted — and in a generation or two, everything else we’re talking about won’t matter. Something has to be done about it very soon in a dedicated, sustained way.

It’s not going to be easy to proceed. There are going to be barriers, difficulties, hardships, failures.  It’s inevitable. But unless the spirit of the last year, here and elsewhere in the country and around the globe, continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

Well, a lot of things. For one, criminal cases for finance-related wrongdoing are hard and complicated to prosecute. The Justice Department is stocked with a lot of people with experience defending financial institutions — including Attorney General Eric Holder, a former partner at Covington & Burling, which represents many of the worst of the mega-banks. Plus, curiously, a lot of Goldman executives and other Wall Street types keep donating lots of money to Obama! (Though less money than they gave him in 2008.) The simple answer is that Holder, and Obama, seem to think that while Wall Street did a lot of stupid, venal things that ruined everyone’s lives, those things were largely … legal. Obama said as much to Rolling Stone: “In some cases, really irresponsible practices that hurt a lot of people might not have been technically against the law.” He might be not entirely wrong! Lots of horrible finance industry practices were and are perfectly legal. But we’ll never quite know whether the line was crossed until we … actually investigate.

So it’s all the odder that Wall Street is so damn mad at Obama, right?

In the only slightly oversimplified narrative of the financial crisis and subsequent recession as you and I and most non-billionaires understand it, Wall Street blew up the world economy, then got bailed out to the tune of billions of dollars, and then resumed being hugely profitable and irresponsible as everyone else suffered through foreclosures, massive debt and mass unemployment. In this narrative, the government, led at various points by members of both parties, did everything in its power to maintain the status quo on Wall Street, while offering primarily temporary relief and various ineffectual half-measures to everyone else. Eventually the Democrats passed some form of “financial regulation” that largely has not yet gone into effect and that will not do much to stem or reverse the financialization of our economy. (The SEC is way, way behind on implenting Dodd-Frank and seems in no great hurry to finish.) The president eventually began noting the existence of mass outrage toward the financial sector, but he did little to actually address that outrage beyond proposing a new tax bracket for millionaires.

So, based on all that, it is very hard to see what Wall Street is so mad about! But as I explained earlier today, most of these rich financial industry titans are also dumb, spoiled children. If anything, the president’s failure to treat the chicanery and fraud that led to the crisis as crimes worth prosecuting had the same effect that his failure to prosecute the architects of Bush’s torture regime had: It emboldened the wrongdoers, who are now convinced that they never did wrong. In this environment, the public’s real and justified outrage at Wall Street is wholly inexplicable to finance types, who blame it on the media and Obama’s occasional rhetorical populism. (He is making people hate bankers by pointing out that people hate bankers!)

Now, in lieu of subpoenas and indictments, we have mild criticism — Obama’s occasional off-message mentions of “fat cat bankers” or whatever — and those mild criticisms set off hysterical waves of paranoia and self-righteous fury. Because no one was hauled off in chains, the people who wreaked so much havoc think it’s actually been established that they did not do wrong.

So Obama has now not succeeded in cowing or placating Wall Street.

“Oh, just living with Mom,” I said, throwing an ironic thumbs up. I shrugged. “You know, with this economy…” Not even a full sentence, it worked as an excuse without technically being a lie. They all nodded with sympathy as if something had happened to me, and not because of me.

They’d heard I’d been in the Peace Corps and surely they pictured me suffering, knee-deep in river mud, hand-scrubbing a tattered poncho. Surely they didn’t picture me lounging on a Brazilian beach, or drinking red wine in Buenos Aires. Surely they didn’t picture my fellow volunteers and me heading to the capital at least once a month, watching dubbed American cable and feeding each other crème brûlée we got delivered to our hotel rooms, almost as a joke on poverty. Surely they didn’t suspect that I’d bought myself an air conditioner when my host mom offered to sell me hers and a horse just because it would probably be my only chance in life to have one, even if being a single woman going out in fields by herself started rumors that I was a hussy. They assumed I suffered in poverty, because suffering was supposed to be part of the fun.

But, out of sight of our host families, we gave in to the temptation to grab at the luxury within reach to break up the sweat, grisly meals and discomfort, both social and physical, that made up so much of our lives there. All you had to do was think in dollars, take out a 20 here and there from that one ATM that accessed American banks, and over two years you could deflate your savings on so many small comforts of the First World.

Even though it was my job to teach the locals about sustainability, I was leading my own unsustainable life, outspending my earnings 2-to-1, living on the edge of my credit limit and willfully ignoring the ticking of borrowed time. This is what leads to recession, on any scale.

At my high school reunion, I let the assumed victimhood ride, but at home, Mom knew better.

“You have three months,” she said. My stimulus package: 90 days of free rent, free food, unlimited pool and pool floatie raft access, as well as full-time use of her Jeep Cherokee while she drove her husband’s work truck with the 7-foot blind spot.

I slipped into the refuge of her life, but at night, lying under her seashell comforter, I felt the absence of everything I’d let myself lose. She knocked on her own guest bedroom door and came in, smiling, delighted to have her daughter on the same continent. She sat on the edge of the bed, stroking my hair. “Everything will be OK,” she said, seeing my red eyes. Her voice smoothed the hot shame, even though I had no reason to believe what she said.

The story was always that she and Dad had balanced each other out in every way, except that they were both bad with money. This was my breeding. I had lived paycheck to paycheck since I started scooping ice cream for a living at 14. In middle school, I was the one asking if anyone had 50 cents. In high school, I was the one losing the clothes I’d borrowed from friends. In college, I was the one lying in a clinic, selling my plasma for $20 of beer money.

Windfalls came at times: a tax return or a student loan check. After swearing I’d hold tight to the money this time, I never failed to let it slip through my fingers. Mom had bailed me out so many times that we put her name on my bank account so she could make deposits more quickly. Over the years, I sunk into debt with greater and greater abandon until I now found myself wearing my mom’s shoes to a temp job processing insurance forms.

Mom and I crossed paths in the kitchen while getting ready in the mornings, just like when I was in high school. “Honey, do you want a fruit cup?” she asked, packing me a lunch just this once. As I left, she handed me an insulated turquoise lunch box.

At work that day, I scraped my fruit cup with a plastic spoon and said to the other temps, one of whom was living in a homeless shelter, “You know, right now you just gotta do what you gotta do.”

I couldn’t even begin to make a plan. Plans required hope. After so many failures, failure became an all caps noun that I wore across my forehead at my second job as a bad waitress, pouring coffee for my former high school classmates out to organic brunches with their husbands and babies.

I could barely scrounge up the gas money to visit my best friends in their adult lives. They listened to my speech about digging myself out of the hole, doing the right thing this time and said, “That’s good.” When we went out to dinner, I let them pick up the check, making clear once again who was who.

Though already on hardship forbearance for my student loans, I thought the best move would be to apply to grad school. Acceptance would mean those magical student loan checks, a years-long break from paying back my undergrad loans, and, best of all, another smokescreen. You can be poor because you’re in the Peace Corps, you can be poor because of the recession, you can be poor because you’re a grad student, and no one will know that you’re poor because you’re too immature to stop yourself from getting a frappuccino when you have $7 in the bank. I’d worry about paying the debt back later, of course, once I had the great job a fine arts degree would land me.

So, instead of using my paychecks to pay back my mom, I spent them, more than $1,000, on the GRE testing costs and fees to apply for schools that would require more loans to attend. I mailed in the checks and did the approximate math, figuring they’d be OK. I let days pass without facing my bank balance. The longer I procrastinated, the more scared I became of what awaited me behind my user name and password. I held out another day. Then my debit card got declined at the gas station. I used my credit card, which I was pretty sure had at least $12 left to use. Then I went home and had to confront my computer.

Red. NSF. NSF. -$34. -$34. Balance: -$97. By the time I weighed the entire situation, I was hot all over again, panicked as if trapped somewhere, though I was only trapped inside myself.

There was only one place to turn, but the thought of asking my mom for money one more time almost made me nauseous. I had already stretched her generosity so far, who knew when it was going to snap?

When she asked how my day was, I told her what was going on, and she didn’t even make me ask.

“How about $100?” she said, just like I hoped she would.

“How about two?” I said, just to be safe.

She scrunched her brow and stared a second, as if she didn’t recognize the person in front of her.  “Don’t be a taker,” she said.

I had no facial expression in my repertoire to respond to my own mother, looking at me like that, so I just looked down.

Weeks later, I got an acceptance letter to grad school, an invitation to spend $40,000 a year living in one of the world’s most expensive cities, educating myself in the arts, paid for with interest by my future self, guaranteed to be bolstered by emergency loans from my future mom and dinners out from my future friends picking up the tab for their broke grad student buddy. The person I hated myself for being would have accepted. But by that time, I knew what a better person would do, and I knew I wanted to be a better person.

The U.S. Census placed overall poverty numbers in the United States in 2010 at 15.1 percent of the population or 46.2 million. The working poor comprise 10.5 million of that number. According to government criteria, a single individual making an annual income of $10,830 and a family of four living off $22,400 per year qualify as “poor.” It’s a stunning reality that more than 10 million Americans with jobs meet the poverty criteria.

Revised Census figures put the number of Americans living in poverty at almost 50 million. When we were writing our book late last year, nearly 14 million Americans were unemployed, and millions more were under-employed. Keep in mind, those numbers did not include those who simply gave up trying to find a job.

“The Rich and the Rest of Us” presents “12 poverty-changing ideas” for nationwide consideration. Our philosophy is rooted in the principle of “fundamental fairness.” It calls for an economic system that allows poor and working people to live above the poverty line with jobs that have real living-wage salaries.

A new system of fundamental fairness will lead to a tax system that addresses the needs of the working–class people, and not just the mega rich. The rate of inflation has outpaced the rate of wage increases. There must be an equitable system to prevent further expansion of the “working poor” and give people the opportunity to climb out of poverty with dignity.

We know this will not be an easy endeavor. But in a country where millions of families– with both parents working — are still being considered “poor,” fundamental fairness isn’t just a desired outcome, it’s a national priority.

Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen write anthems about the travails of the working man; we line up for the revival of “Death of a Salesman.” John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson hold festivals and fundraisers when farmers suffer. Taxpayers bail out the auto industry and Wall Street and the banks. There’s a sense that manufacturing, or the agrarian economy, is what this country is really about. But culture was, for a while, what America did best: We produce and export creativity around the world. So why aren’t we lamenting the plight of its practitioners? Bureau of Labor Statistics confirm that creative industries have been some of the hardest hit during the Bush years and the Great Recession. But  when someone employed in the world of culture loses a job, he or she feels easier to sneer at than a steel worker or auto worker. (Check out, for example, the unsympathetic comments to a Salon story about job losses among architects, or the backlash to HBO’s “Girls,” for daring to focus on young New Yorkers with artistic dreams and good educations.)

The musicians, actors and other artists we hear about tend to be fabulously successful. But the daily reality for the vast majority of the working artists in this country has little to do with Angelina Jolie or her perfectly toned right leg. “Artists in the Workforce,” a National Endowment for the Arts report released in 2008, before the Great Recession sliced and diced this class, showed the reality of the creative life. While most of the artists surveyed had college degrees, they earned — with a median income, in 2003-’05, of $34,800 — less than the average professional. Dancers made, on average, a mere $15,000. (More than a quarter of the artists in the 11 fields surveyed live in New York and California, two of the nation’s most expensive states, where that money runs out fast. The report has not been updated since 2008.)

“What does it mean in America to be a successful artist?” asks Dana Gioia, the poet who oversaw the study while NEA chairman. “Essentially, these are working-class people – a lot of them have second jobs. They’re highly trained – dancers, singers, actors – and they don’t make a lot of money. They make tremendous sacrifices for their work. They’re people who should have our respect, the same as a farmer. We don’t want a society without them.”

Many of them, in fact, are effectively entrepreneurs, but have little of the regard of the lavishly paid, mythically potent CEO. A working artist is seen neither as the salt of the earth by the left, nor as a “job creator” by the right — but as a kind of self-indulgent parasite by both sides. Why the disconnect?

“There’s always this sense that art is just play,” says Peter Plagens, a New York painter and art critic. “Art is what children do and what retired people do. Your mom puts your work up on the refrigerator. Or the way Dwight Eisenhower said, ‘Now that I’ve fought my battles, I can put my easel up outside.’”

The reality is different. An ecology of churches, chamber series, libraries, on-call studio work and small and mid-size orchestras that neither pay a salary nor offer medical coverage keep musicians like Adriana Zoppo going: A hardworking freelance violinist who performs across Southern California, she’s played, over the last year or so, at a church chamber series, on “American Idol,” a Glenn Frey standards record and a scene of background music for “Mad Men,” and with her own Baroque chamber group. She’s also a regular player in the Santa Barbara Symphony, for which she drives 100 miles each way for four rehearsals and two concerts a month. “I just do a lot of driving, like every freelancer I know,” she says; every week, students come to her apartment for lessons. The economy — and the loss of audience and donors — mean her work is down by about a third. “There’s more and more time between jobs.”

It’s even tougher, she says, for people who rely on the movie studios. “Even before the economy went down, studios started doing more outside California; a lot of it is in Eastern Europe.” For those who made their living playing on records and movie soundtracks, “All of a sudden, they’re making about 60 percent of what they did. What I see is a lot of people looking for things outside music — a lot of people have gotten real estate licenses. I know people who’ve added massage therapist.” Some have dropped medical coverage they can’t afford, taking their chances.

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Of course, those who continue to work in the creative class are the lucky ones. Employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show just how badly the press and media have missed the story. For some fields, the damage tracks, in an extreme way, along with the Great Recession. Jobs in graphic design, photographic services, architectural services – the bureau’s phrasing indicates that it is looking at all of the jobs within a field, including the people who, say, answer the phone at a design studio – all peaked before the market crash and and fell, 19.8 percent over four years for graphic design, 25.6 percent over seven years for photography and a brutal 29.8 percent, for architecture, over just three years. “Theater, dance and other performing arts companies” – this includes everything from Celine Dion’s Vegas shows to groups that put on Pinter plays – down 21.9 percent over five years.

Other fields show how the recession aggravated existing trends, but reveal that an implosion arrived before the market crash and has continued through our supposed recovery. “Musical groups and artists” plummeted by 45.3 percent between August 2002 and August of 2011. “Newspaper, book and directory publishers” are down 35.9 percent between January 2002 and a decade later; jobs among “periodical publishers” fell by 31.6 percent during the same period.

So why aren’t we talking about it?

Creative types, we suspect, are supposed to struggle. Artists themselves often romanticize their fraught early years: Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” and the various versions of the busker’s tale “Once” show how powerful this can be. But these stories often stop before the reality that follows artistic inspiration begins: Smith was ultimately able to commit her life to music because of a network of clubs, music labels and publishers. And however romantic life on the edge seems when viewed from a distance, “Once’s” Guy can’t keep busking forever.

Yes, the Internet makes it possible to connect artists directly to fans and patrons. There are stories of fans funding the next album by a favorite musician — but those musicians, as well, acquired that audience in part through the now-melted creative-class infrastructure that boosted Smith. And yes, there have been success stories on Kickstarter, as well — but even Kickstarter accepts just 60 percent of all proposals, and only about 43 percent of those end up being crowd-funded.

Our image of the creative class comes from a strange mix of sources, among them faux-populist politics, changing values, technological rewiring, and the media’s relationship to culture – as well as good old-fashioned American anti-intellectualism.

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It was only relatively late in the evolution of the species – after we settled down into cities and began to accumulate private property – that food surpluses, and with them, specialization, developed and allowed the existence of a creative class for the first time. The resentment may have started there, in the Bronze Age.

We’ll probably never know its deepest origins, but we can clearly document the roots of anti-aestheticism in the very founding of this country: The Puritans who settled the Atlantic shores were austerity-loving religious fanatics who saw art not just as frivolous or womanly, but as idolatry: Before sailing here they’d become notorious across England for smashing stained glass windows and ripping the benches from church choirs. Much of this aggression was directed against the Catholic Church, but the Puritans were no more fond of the church’s support for painting and music than they were of other instances of papery.

And while much of the landed gentry who founded the nation were intellectuals and aesthetes, the frontier myth resonates much more loudly. “Noble savage”-loving Rousseau, critic Leslie Fiedler wrote, is our real founding father, and our early literature is about men fleeing civilization and book learnin’ for an unmediated experience with nature at its most raw. When – decades later — vaudeville, circuses and early motion pictures began to spread, they were denounced for their corrupting influence on the young and working classes. “They were considered a threat to the American way of life,” says popular culture historian Robert J. Thompson.

Europeans, says Plagens, have a very different relationship to the arts because of a high culture going back to the Renaissance and before. “Over here, America is more tied to pragmatism – clearing the land, putting the railroad through … And artists don’t really help with that, so we’re suspect.”

Novelist Jonathan Lethem, whose father was what the writer describes as “a non-famous artist,” sees the American artist as living in internal exile. American history is stamped with “a distrust of the urban, the historical, the bookish in favor of a fantasy of frontier libertarian purity. And the Protestant work ethic has a distrust of what’s perceived as decadence.”

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We don’t wear buckles on our hats anymore; even coonskin caps have fallen out of style. But these latent notions in human nature and the American mind have taken a great step forward – or backward – recently. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew were demonizing long-haired bohemians, know-it-all professors, journalists and other seditious types since around the time of Woodstock. But these seeds of paranoia really blossomed with the invention of the term the “cultural elite.” During the “Murphy Brown” wars of 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle spoke at the Commonwealth Club of California, connecting the Los Angeles riots to a group sitting “in newsrooms, sitcom studios, and faculty lounges all over America,” jeering at regular people. “We have two cultures,” he said, “the cultural elite and the rest of us.”

This term redefined “elite” from its previous associations (many of them positive) with skill and accomplishment, or wealth and explicit power. (And Quayle was, after all, not only a vice president but a wealthy man from several generations of money.) It also oriented the resented group around education, culinary tastes (they always seemed to be described drinking white wine or lattes) and attraction to culture. Presumably this cultural elite was driving to the opera in its Volvos – somehow managing to both sip a cappuccino and laugh at regular people at the same time — while dreaming up ways to undermine the American way.  While the cultural left has led assaults on the literary canon, or the race and gender of artists whose work hangs in museums, and so on, it’s rarely duplicated the anti-intellectual populism of the far right quite so well.

“Cultural elite,” says Lethem, is “a code word for people who are getting away with something for far too long. It’s a term of distrust – you can almost hear a plan for vengeance in it. Republican politics hardened these impulses and made them more virulent and paranoid.”

If someone who takes in culture – or who writes about it or teaches it, as in Quayle’s original formulation – is somehow “not like us,” the only person more discredited is someone who spends his life producing this stuff.

“There is a pampered class of artists in the United States,” concedes Gioia, who got to know a wide range of creative types during his years as NEA chair. “But it’s tiny. And they make insignificant money compared to sports people. We have this Puritan, practical tradition in the United States. Puritans would give to the poor, but not to the idle. Artists are seen as these idle dreamers.”

More typical than a celebrity artist feasting on enormous grants, he says, is someone like Morton Lauridsen, who is now one of the most performed living composers – after decades of scraping by, teaching and writing choral works. Or a writer like Kay Ryan, who, until becoming U.S. poet laureate in 2008 was known to only a small few. “She never applied for a grant, never taught writing,” Gioia says. “She taught remedial reading at a community college.”

It was the Coast Guard Academy band, in New London, Conn., that allowed Kelli O’Connor, a conservatory-trained clarinet and saxophone player, to make a living. These days she’s a principal in a nearby orchestra, plays with a chamber group at a Boston church, coaches at area high schools and teaches at the University of Rhode Island: None of these pay a full salary or significant benefits. “Freelancing is a hustle all the time,” she says. “You master the art of scheduling. Squeezing in as much as possible. There are some days when I’m not done until 11 or 12 at night, and then I have to get up at 7 in the morning.”

Like most musicians, she teaches private lessons, but her students have fallen by more than half. “Because of the economy, it’s really gone downhill. People are afraid to spend their money. You’re constantly sending your C.V. to local schools to stir up interest.”

“More than any other group of artists, musicians are getting a raw deal,” said a rare story on the crisis, in Crain’s New York Business.

The story of the struggling musician is nothing new, but with smaller orchestras like the Long Island Philharmonic and the Queens Symphony scaling back, and musicals and dance productions using fewer players or none at all, professional musicians — many who studied for years at prestigious schools like Juilliard — are facing an increasingly tough time. They are being forced to piece together bits of freelance work, take on heavy teaching schedules or leave the business altogether. Over the past decade, the number of members of the Associated Musicians of Greater New York Local 802 has shrunk to 8,500 from about 15,000.

Tino Gagliardi, president of Local 802, told Crain’s, “There are fewer opportunities for musicians, and as the work diminishes, people move on.”

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Most people get their ideas about artists and entertainers from the media – TV, the newspapers, radio and so on. When we see actors, musicians, and architects on the covers of magazines or on television, we think we’re getting a look at the creative class. But most often, we don’t see them at all.

Newspapers, especially, have long felt a romanticism, and sense of duty, toward a “man in the street,” a kind of salt-of-the-earth figure who could – depending on the location or era – come out of Springsteen or Steinbeck. “There’s the old saw about afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted,” says James Rainey, who reports on the press for the Los Angeles Times and is one of few journos who has written well on the damage to his own industry.

Coverage of the most vulnerable is among the noble things the press still does. But it means that some strata get overlooked. When papers have written about the recession, for instance, they’ve leaned very heavily on coverage of the poor and working class; professionals, say, losing their homes because of the unemployment or falling housing values hardly show up. One mainstay in recession-era stories about the creative class has been pieces about artists who have “reinvented” themselves – an architect brewing a perfect cup of coffee — in difficult times. Or artsy types who have pursued their “Plan B” – making vegan cupcakes or running a groovy ice cream truck. Fun to read, counterintuitive, more colorful than dreary unemployment statistics – and deeply unrepresentative of what’s really going on.

More honest – and harder to find — is the kind of thing veteran food writer Amanda Hesser just conceded on the blog Food52: That she can no longer advise even talented and diligent young journalists to follow her path. “Except for a very small group of people (some of whom are clinging to jobs at magazines that pay more than the magazines’ business models can actually afford), it’s nearly impossible to make a living as a food writer,” she writes, “and I think it’s only going to get worse.”

One side of the equation, though, is well represented. The celebrity-industrial complex has all but exploded since the 1980s: Rainey recently spoke to a magazine editor who complained about being held hostage by a marketplace that demanded more and more coverage of people famous for being famous.

“Part of this is because there are so many more news outlets than 30 years ago,” he says. “When I started out, you didn’t have Us, OK, so many supermarket tabloids that are big sellers and all about celebrity. On the TV side, there are hundreds of channels about celebrities, and you’ve got TMZ on the Web, Perez Hilton … That’s pulled some of the mainstream outlets in that direction.”

But newspapers, who by some estimates laid off as many as 50 percent of their arts writers in the years after the 2008 crash, may not be in the best position to document the crumbling of non-corporate culture outside Hollywood and television (both of which consume the lion’s share of media coverage). In their urge not to seem elitist, they may shy away from the struggles of folks in the fine and performing arts especially.

It’s nothing as craven or cynical as “media bias,” but the full picture of culture in this country doesn’t get told. Says Rainey: “There’s more attention to celebrities than to everyday people who put together productions, or who struggle to make a living in the arts.”

To most Americans, this middle class of the creative class might as well be invisible.

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Technology has reshaped this issue in another way. “The stereotype of the creative genius has not let go when we look at people out of the past,” says Thompson, the Syracuse University historian. He lists a number of costume-drama images – crazy-brilliant figures like Mozart and Van Gogh – whose prestige is undiminished and whose work is still widely revered.

“But we are much less willing to apply this to people who are still alive. Because distribution has been democratized by the Internet, we tend to think that talent has been democratized as well.” If everyone can post their videos on YouTube, why are some filmmakers richer and more famous than others?

“I think it’s changed the way we look at the contemporary creative class. A lot of it is resentment: Why are you up there when I can do this too?”

This backlash against the creative class – when is the last time we’ve seen an artist or an intellectual in a mainstream film, set in the present rather than a romanticized past, who was not evil or pretentious? – is part of a larger revolt against experts and expertise. We’ve come a long way since the days of Sputnik, when education and intelligence were valorized in a burst of Cold War chauvinism.

Steve Jobs and technological heroes are still worshiped, says Thompson, but it doesn’t translate to creative people who do things that are intangible or hard to understand. “I’ve seen people walk into a museum and say, ‘I can do that,’” he says. “They can’t, of course. But when their computer breaks down, they know they can’t fix it. Creativity is a form of expertise,” something a nation that keeps insisting on its status as a democracy has never been entirely comfortable with.

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There are other changes in sensibility besides rabid faux-populism that spell hostility to the arts and those who work in them. One of them is a kind of market fundamentalism – the idea that everything, whether education, culture or the state of our souls can be bought, sold and measured. “What Isn’t for Sale?” asks an article in the April Atlantic. (You can now buy “access to the car pool lane while driving solo,” rent a woman’s womb, “shoot an endangered black rhino,” and get your doctor’s cellphone number if you’re willing to pay for it, Michael J. Sandel points out. The growth of for-profit hospitals, warfare, community security and schools – which have recently gotten a sweet tax break – show how far we’ve gone in the last few decades.)

We see this same point of view in economic impact studies of the arts and the push for what’s called “cultural tourism” – museums and philharmonics arguing their worth based on the capital they generate. You see it, from the opposite side, when a cultural entity goes bankrupt. When a Kentucky paper reported the Chapter 11 filings of the Louisville Orchestra, the accompanying comments gave a sense of the way we think about culture and the market.

“Get rid of them, the Ballet and any other useless tax funded ‘entertainment’ that isnt self supporting,” one said. “Pack up your fiddles and go home boys and girls. Maybe find real jobs. Go to Nashville and vie for some sessions work.” A third: “Sale all of assets to pay these people off, fire them all and get rid of the Orchestra. It isnt popular with the residents or they would have packed crowds and not have to worry about $$$.” And unambiguous in its market fundamentalism: “The orchestra creates a product. That product has lost public appeal. Just like any business, this one needs to shut down. If your product isn’t selling there is no reason to continue in business.” Needless to say, classical music and other art forms originated and evolved in the age of patronage, well before the market economy.

It brings to mind Oscar Wilde’s line: “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

“Everything now has to be fully accountable,” says Plagens. “An English department has to show it brings in enough money, that it holds its own with the business side. Public schools are held accountable in various bean-counting ways. The senator can point to the ‘pointy-headed professor’ teaching poetry and ask, ‘Is this doing any good? Can we measure this?’ It’s a culture now measured by quantities rather than qualities. We don’t have any faith any more in the experts when they say, ‘Trust us.’”

Says Lethem: “These days everything has to have a clear market value, a proven use for mercantile culture. Well, art doesn’t pass that test very naturally. You can make the art gesture into something the marketplace values. But it’s always distorting and grotesque.” (The awkward fit reminds him of the Philip K. Dick story “The Preserving Machine,” about a scientist who tries to convert treasured musical scores into animals that can survive an apocalypse – with unpleasant results.)

In some ways, the obsession with economics – both inside and outside the arts – is driven by economics itself. “Forty years ago,” says Plagens, who chronicled the West Coast art scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s in a gem of a book, “Sunshine Muse,” “you rented an art gallery for not much money, and bought a few gallons of white paint. Now you need investors and backers and all sorts of digital technology. So there’s a bigger emphasis on having a business plan than the old bohemian model.”

The final irony is that these are times when we most need the arts but seem the most resistant to culture and the people who produce it.

Despite the crisis in the creative fields in general, mass-distributed entertainment is in a boom cycle. (Movies, because they cost consumers less than most live entertainment, is typically counter-cyclical.)  “Popular art and commercial art is a form of escape,” says Plagens. “It’s what people want, especially in hard times; it’s what you got in the ‘30s, with movies about the heiress who disguises herself as a poor working girl, and so on,” which he sees as the precursor to the tidal wave of sequels, remakes and lame romantic comedies.

“Serious art – novels, what you have in the galleries – brings you back to reality and makes you look at your life. Serious art makes people uncomfortable – and during these times, we don’t need more discomfort.”