The middle class is over. It's not coming back. | Hacker News Reader

The middle class is over. It's not coming back.

theglobeandmail.com

24 pointsruang37 comments

As PG says in http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html - we're essentially all middle-class, even Bill Gates in the original sense of the word. As he states, even a poor American on welfare has many more amenities than a king of old.

Nearly everyone has an increasing standard of living. It's this you've got to look at. You just can't use the standards and markers of the past to judge how things are now, or how they are going to be. Because the standards of the past cannot, by definition, take into account the choices of today. You can't balance out, say. widespread mobile internet coverage with, say, people having larger homes 50 years ago. Because even the richest guy in the world couldn't access the internet on a mobile device 50 years ago.

It's natural to be pessimistic. It's also natural to believe that the problems of today can only be solved using the solutions of today. Tomorrow will bring new problems, it will also bring new solutions. But even as each new set of problems is created, and old set is solved and the overall standard of living creaks one step higher, unlikely to slip backwards again.

This is really about freedom, education/opportunity, justice. Whereas there really was a stratification, that's becoming flattened. As you say, the pessimistic part of me thinks that all of those things I just listed are being reduced for that segment of population formerly known as the middle class.

It is easy to confuse consumer goods and an easy life with what is means to be middle class.

46) Pundits will produce lengthy lists of vaguely doomy-sounding predictions without any explanation of why they're making them or why we should believe them.

Instead of building the future together, let's all panic and stock up on canned food.

Given humanity's track record for collaboratively solving problems that didn't involve bombing the fuck out of someone you'll forgive me if stash a few cases of MRE's as a hedge.

Go ahead and stash those MREs, disaster preparation is a good idea anyhow and they do happen.

But look about at the world over the past thousand years and tell me how terrible our track record is again. Our track record is not demonstrated by how many problems we think we have today, but how many problems we've dispatched. How much time are you planning on spending worrying about whether or not you'll be invaded by barbarians today? And I mean really honestly worrying about it, not striking a pose as a social signal about how fashionably pessimistic you are.

There's been a lot of progress; it only feels like it doesn't because as you climb the Maslow hierarchy your wealth allows a net larger number of problems to emerge. But they are, ultimately, lesser problems. A key component of staying sane in the modern world is to remember this.

> How much time are you planning on spending worrying about whether or not you'll be invaded by barbarians today?

That seems to be a primary concern of the Arizona state legislature: http://www.google.com/search?q=arizona+sb+1070

If you consider the rebuilding of germany after ww2 or the case of japan rising from feudalism to highest level of technology in short time, I don't see why one should be that pessimistic.

If the apocalypse comes, deal with it.

Just because jobs (like travel agents) disappear does not mean that there are not going to be any middle class jobs. It means that we have found a way to make travel arrangements more efficiently so we have freed up resources to be better spent on other things. And if there is no middle class, who does he think is making the travel arrangements online?

Exactly. The decline of travel agents overlaps closely with the rise of Yoga studios. Mid-skill retail entrepreneurs will find a way to keep busy.

The article has some interesting sections, but whenever someone gets too dystopian about the working class ala "Fight Club" without also talking about quality of life metrics they lose credibility. Think about how cheap things have gotten. An iPod touch is basically mini-computer, game console, portable TV, GPS, Walkman, digital camera, and more for ~$200. How much would all of that cost someone in a time that was better for the middle class? It is a complex calculation, but I'm much more optimistic than the author.

The decline of travel agents overlaps closely with the rise of Yoga studios. Mid-skill retail entrepreneurs will find a way to keep busy.

Not only that, but they probably enjoy their job a lot more.

I've never taught Yoga, but I have taught martial arts [1]. It's far more enjoyable than booking airline tickets on a computer, and I'll bet money that teaching Yoga is as well.

[1] Only to total beginners, I'm entry level myself.

This strikes me as an interesting point:

"10) In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness"

While the statement certainly seems at first almost trivially true, I think there are cases to be made that the second part is not.

For instance: a non-trivial amount of people after leaving college have a significant 'draw-down' in the amount of people they talk to or (you could say) have a connectedness to. Facebook is still there, they still have 300 friends, but the number of people with whom they have meaningful interactions slims and may (for some) continue to slim for the rest of their lives.

I imagine the elderly (in the US) today, especially, are far less connected, even taking in to account those which have skype,etc.

Or: I am getting old. I am scared. In my times... Damn kids, get off my lawn!

Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day?

Horseshit, I make a very comfortable, middle class living at an online/mobile travel commerce start-up that does booking transactions in much the same way that a travel agent used to. The travel agent job disappeared, but Expedia, Tarvelocity and Orbitz -to name just the big, public facing brands of this transition- employ tens of thousands of middle class people.

Way to miss the point. His whole argument is that computers and internet-enabled self-service have taken over the majority of the menial labor that travel agents used to do. A travel agent, in case you've never seen one, is someone working in a retail-location shop, behind a counter where they help people plan trips by showing them glossy brochures of hotels, finding the cheapest fares for people, or assemble packages of hotel stays, flights and restaurant visits. Pretty much all of which has been taken over by computers, replacing hundreds of thousands of jobs with tens of thousands of jobs, a large number of which in high-tech with (relatively) high wages. Lots of manual labor by people who aren't very capable are replaced with a few highly capable (or at least highly specialized) people. That's his point, and it's happening in the travel industry, in mail distribution, in manufacturing - everywhere.

(to be clear, I'm all in favor of this - it's progress. It's going to suck being of median intelligence in 20 years though; relatively, someone of median intelligence is going to be worse off as compared to 50 years ago. Of course in absolute terms they're going to have a major advantage, so I don't feel bad for anyone.)

Aren't you significantly more efficient than the travel agents of the 80s?

So, your single-person living has removed the need for 10 or 20 (or 50?) travel agency folks of a previous non-Internet 'must visit that travel agent around the corner to get my trivial purchase Thanksgiving tickets' world.

Which represents progress, are you really missing out on anything using the internet and being shown all the best deals available and all the information a travel agent would have provided.

Employment for the sake of employment isn't the answer, all throughout history people have done things in the most efficient ways available to then, just for most of history this involved a sizable labor force.

I don't think he was referring to "middle class" in the same sense you are. You are using "middle class" to describe a certain standard of living. The author is saying that we will all achieve this standard of living and it will no longer be a status marker.

You can already see this occurring. Having a cell phone, for example, is not a status marker anymore - everyone who wants one has one. Status is now about having the most pictures/friends/farms on facebook.

There is nothing inherently bad about a lack of status symbols, if you even consider a cell phone a status symbol. You can get a cell phone for free on a $20/month contract.

Meanwhile, luxury items stay out of reach for most people, even if they want them (designer anything, expensive cars, mansion sized houses, etc).

I digressed, but there is no danger to cell phones or any new tech for that matter, being universally available.

The point is that cell phones used to be a luxury item - if you recall the movie "Wall Street", they were an example of conspicuous consumption by Gordon Gekko. In the sequel (according to the trailer), the the old cell phone is comic relief.

Apart from goods with an artificially high price and limited supply (designer goods), and possibly goods which cannot be manufactured (land), the author is predicting that luxury items of today will be commodities of tomorrow.

I agree with you - this is an extremely good thing.

travel agents still exist, they're just fewer and doing slightly different things.

The only thing wrong about the next 10 years will be that we will have to share them with pessimists.

14) Something smarter than us is going to emerge

Thank you, algorithms and cloud computing.

Really? I respected Coupland before I read that. I thought blithely throwing around buzzwords was beneath him.

Contradictory advice:

* Move to San Diego * The suburbs are doomed, especially those E.T., California-style suburbs

Conclusion: Move to San Diego because it's doomed.

I wonder where this one came from: “We will still be annoyed by people who pun, but we will be able to show them mercy because punning will be revealed to be some sort of connectopathic glitch: The punner, like someone with Tourette's, has no medical ability not to pun.”

Probably reddit. It's hard to find any thread on a front page subject that doesn't have a pun sub-thread.

I've been assuming something like Manna by Marshall Brain http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

i think the biggest problem is that due to the financial crisis many companies were forced to cut staff...and since many people were afraid to lose their jobs they started working harder for the same pay.

so now the same jobs that were done by 4 people are now done by 1 person.

Plot summary: Indulge in pessimism.

Maybe Paul Verhoeven will option this blog post for a movie.

To temper this pessimism with some sobering reality, on another HN thread today I was pointed to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

Well worth watching.

Somehow, some time the population is going down. Way down.

Now I need to read something happy...

Well, I was having a good morning.

The middle class will be gone if we continue to raise taxes in the US and have social programs that we just can't afford.

It will equal everyone out in a sense and we will be left with the really rich and the rest.

As opposed to now? I couldn't find a good article to link, but I think it's relatively common knowledge at this point that for a while now money has been flowing from the middle classes into the coffers of the rich. I recall reading that the top 1% have 4 times as much wealth as they had 30 years ago.

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