How Now the Dow? It’s Hard to Avoid Knowing

The Dow has taken to perching lately in a corner of the CNN morning news. Have you noticed? The anchorman talks while, up to one side, this little number sits ticking. “Japan,” he says, and the digits tumble. “Greenspan,” and they perk up again.

Most days we ignore it. Oh, we know it’s important. But have you noticed how easy it’s gotten to transcend “important” things? Political inquisitions, global crises--maybe we’re older and wiser or maybe we’re just in denial, but for whatever reason, we can’t seem to work up that lather they do on “The Capitol Gang.”

Nonetheless, the other morning, the Dow caught our eye, and we have to admit, it was entertaining to watch. Nothing seemed to go unmeasured, down to the mattress commercial and the weather. Trust me, not even that channel with the country line dancers would have left you so mesmerized.

It made us realize how ubiquitous the stock market is now. Have you noticed? The Dow is everywhere, from your kid’s pager to your co-worker’s computer screen. Like Washington sex talk, you can’t escape it. It’s in your face, 24 hours a day.

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On the upside, there’s something great about this development: Who, a generation ago, would

have imagined that 40% of the people in this country would someday feel sophisticated enough to own stock? In the 1960s, only about one American in five had the money and self-confidence to invest in the market. In our lifetime, stock portfolios have gone from being something people associated with fat cats to being so common, you almost have to remind yourself that they were once swanky, like TVs and indoor bathtubs.

That’s progress. That means that, whatever the return on investment, we are seeing ourselves in a bigger way. But in the short term, there’s also the flip side: Fixating on numbers can drive you bananas. Also, it can cut you off from the fact that too many still don’t share your prosperity.

Take, for example, Stephanie Jones, data entry clerk, who on a recent afternoon is speed-walking in a caftan and sneakers up a downtown Los Angeles street toward her bus stop, not far from the Pacific Stock Exchange.

Jones has five kids and a house in South-Central L.A. but so far, no stocks and no nest egg.

“People at the bank where I work talk about it all day, talking about, ‘Gonna sell this, gonna buy that,’ ” she confides. “I guess if I had the money. . . . But since I don’t--well, you know how it goes. One man’s up, the other man’s down.”

Ditto for the guys washing cars at the Avis lot across the street. “Man, I ain’t even got enough money for regular expenses, let alone understand stocks and points and all that,” laughs Carlos Campos, 18. He calls to his buddy, who’s polishing the hubcap of a Honda. “Hey! Tiene stocks, pues?” The guy laughs until his stomach aches.

Or, for variation, there’s the perspective of Mei Hung, 32, a Chinese waitress working the night shift at a Japanese restaurant. She has no stocks, but her wealthier friends do, and lately, what with global uncertainty shaking the market, “all of them are very upset.”

This situation makes her smile. It reminds her of the way she felt one recent night when a guy in a ski mask snatched her backpack as she walked home from work. “He run away,” she says, “and I think, ‘Poor robber. Fortunately, I have nothing yet.’ ”

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We know a guy whose company had an employee stock plan. Over the years, he

amassed a bunch of stock but rarely thought about it most days. Then one morning, the company started posting its closing stock price outside the employee cafeteria. It made the guy so crazy, he sold every share, just so he could stop obsessing about his 401(k).

No doubt he ate his heart out when the company’s stock later doubled, but when we last talked to him, that stock was in the tank. He was in a happy, told-you-so mood, perched in the “fortunately, I have nothing” camp.

I suppose that’s one way to deal with a phenomenon that’s as much mass biofeedback as it is news. Or you could take a view that I suspect is more common, and not just with stocks: that people have a funny way of noticing when an “important” thing gets important enough to matter. Then, with or without prodding, they handle it.

Thus, on that day outside the stock exchange, amid news rife with “importance,” you found folks like Claudia, a Federal Express courier with stock in her retirement plan. Hoisting a crate, she grunted: “My strategy is to take the long view.” Which is progress, though it defies measurement.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com