Comment by TangoTrotFox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TangoTrotFox | Hacker News Reader

I think the first thing that conversations like this need are data. I ran into this [1] when actually searching information on the chiseling out of the middle class. And that paper does describe that. In 1979 the middle class controlled 46% of all income, and the upper/rich classes controlled 30%. Today (well at least today as of 2014) the rich and upper class control 63% with the middle class left with 26%. There's even been a chiseling out of the middle class as a whole declining from 38.8% of society to 32% of society.

But the eye opener is this. This is the change in the size of each economic group between 1979 and 2014 as a percent of the total population:

- Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8%

- Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4%

- Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32%

- Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1%

- Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8%

Statistics like this are certainly subject to biased interpretation and 'massaging'. If one is curious about the source, wiki has a section on the political stance of the Urban Institute [2]. Though the paper itself is very transparent in their methodology and extremely readable. I found it all eye opening to the point that it actually changed my worldview.

[1] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stan...

And here's some extra info that accompanied this data: "The growth in the rich and upper middle class and the declining proportion of the population in the middle and lower classes indicate widespread economic growth between 1979 and 2014, but that growth was not distributed equally. On average, incomes grew 53 percent over the period. If the growth had been equally distributed (figure 3), then the shift upward would have been much greater. At the extremes, the proportion of the poor and near-poor population would have dropped to 12.8 percent, and the proportion that is rich would have barely increased (to only 0.5 percent of the population) because the growth among the near-rich with even growth would have been much less than what happened with uneven growth. With even growth, the size of the middle class would have declined but the growth in the upper middle class would have added another 6 percentage points and reached over a third (35.2 percent) of the nondependent adult population."

Absolutely. But at the same time I think most people have a fundamentally incorrect view of society. If we just break those classes into rich/middle/poor we have in a very short period of time (1979 to 2014) gone from:

- rich: 13% -> 31.2%

- middle: 38.8% -> 32%

- poor: 48.2% -> 36.9%

There has been a major migration of people upwards in society. The poor are becoming middle class and the middle class are becoming rich. I think most people instead think society is remaining stagnant with all the wealth going to the same people, even more incorrectly that society is becoming more poor except for a small handful of people.

We are doing some things seriously right. You would never imagine this from how things like inequality are normally framed. Like mentioned I certainly didn't. I found this study looking to confirm my bias that society was actually deteriorating (or at best stagnating) socioeconomically. The problem is that is utterly and absolutely wrong!

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