Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

Stories like this demonstrate that our idea of the "middle class" is a postwar anomaly. People ask why the middle class is shrinking, but really we should be asking why such a large middle class ever existed. It was never normal until after WWII.

In the postwar period, American manufacturing had far less competition than it does now. Most other industrialized countries were recovering from the war, foreign cars did not fit American consumer preferences, and China was locked into a decades-long cycle of self-destruction. Automation technology wasn't very good, so there were tons of factory jobs. All of that has now changed.

This man's job, and the other jobs like it, only existed because of historical circumstances that cannot be replicated. Politicians might be able to save some manufacturing jobs, but we will never have nearly as many as we did before.

I feel sorry for this man, because jobs like his aren't coming back, and because he is being lied to by politicians who say those jobs can be saved.

It's possible that what we are now seeing is the end of a historical and economic anomaly: a mass middle class. Our politics is not handling it well.

>only existed because of historical circumstances that cannot be replicated

Replace historical with political. Distribution is always political. You want a strong middle class raise top marginal tax rates back up to 70%

Another take is that a lot of our productivity gains are being eaten by out of control healthcare costs: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-14/u-s-ec...

I couldn't find any good data in my 5 minutes of googling, but I would also expect a good part of CPI/PCE inflation numbers to be about housing costs, and it's pretty clear that housing costs are largely driven by bad regulation, chief among the issues being restrictive zoning laws, but helped along by all sorts of others like CEQA or NY's Scaffold Law etc.

Much of Europe still has a strong middle-class. People there can work service jobs and live comfortably. The specific industries that created factory jobs may be in inevitable decline, but the middle-class itself is not. That problem is a political one.

History has shown time and again that capitalism left to its own devices does not create a middle-class. As long as Americans keep waiting for it to do so, the middle-class will keep shrinking. Until we get a new New Deal, this trend will not change.

Ironically, many of the people voting for deregulation and small-government are the ones being hurt the most by those things.

> Much of Europe still has a strong middle-class.

Debatable if we factor in the cost of living in many places.

The rise of populism across Europe, including Brexit, has the same root cause as the rise of populism in America: people believing they have been left behind by the global economy and abandoned by mainstream politicians.

Abandoned by mainstream politicians yes, that's the definition of populism (politicians who position themselves against a general 'elite').

Left behind by the global economy, no, there's no evidence of that. It's a New York Times trope designed to make liberal readers feel superior. Polls showed quite clearly that Brexit was motivated by (a) immigration levels and (b) sovereignty, but these are hard to separate because if the UK was self-ruling and the political elite were more in touch with the population, immigration levels would have been kept lower a long time ago and the issue would never have become as neuralgic. People who are angry over ultra-high immigration levels are both annoyed at the quantity but also annoyed at being ignored and told to shut up about it by out of touch politicians.

In particular, there isn't much discussion of trade war in the UK, nor the rest of Europe.

Maybe a pre-middle class was created by Henry Ford. He wanted to create a car that his workers could afford. Also, maybe Sears with their Homes Catalog. It seems like the teens and twenties included some steps up Maslows hierarchy for some masses.

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