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Comment by true_tuna | Hacker News Reader

High technology jobs that you can only get if you went to college and got a technical degree. Which is disproportionately available to families who are already wealthy. Meaning the working class gets hollowed out, the rich and powerful get more rich and powerful and the unemployment and related addiction crisis get even worse. Yay! Brave new future.

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shrug I meet a lot of young people without degrees doing jobs that didn't exist 10-15 years ago too (e.g. social media managers). And there are way more people with degrees these days.

I think there are other less impersonal, more policy driven reasons than robots why the middle class is being hollowed out, but it sure feels like they'd rather we believed it was robots.

The US are the anomaly. In most of the developed world, higher education is actually quite affordable. Technical education is also the easiest to get funding for.

It turns out financial limitations are the easy factor to solve. Other, non-financial limits to social mobility are so much more stubborn.

In fact, in some northern countries like Finland, all education is completely free, and the government pays you allowance so you can focus on studies.

The only requirement is to pass the entry exams, which anyone can take

Well, given that many of the readers of this forum, including myself, never went to college yet manage to pull down a healthy six figure salary, I think the actual situation is a bit more nuanced. Developers making a cushy living are firmly within what used to be considered the middle class, and if you take into account the stagnation of wage growth over the last 40 years we're all getting fucked. Also, many white collar office jobs are paying relatively poorly these days, and those are more likely to require a degree than a job in tech. A $50k salary in 2019 isn't what it used to be.

Devs making more than six figures anywhere but the bay area and perhaps NYC are upper middle class, probably in the top 10% of earners in their area, may even qualify as wealthy.

Technically yes, although as a specific example $100k/yr is the 80th percentile in Austin, TX[0]. My point was, if you define middle class as the middle of the income distribution, yes; if you define middle class more subjectively, like "being able to afford a house in the suburbs and pay for 2.5 college tuitions", that privilege is now out of reach for pretty much everyone except the 80th percentile and up.

[0] https://statisticalatlas.com/place/Texas/Austin/Household-In...

>Technically yes, although as a specific example $100k/yr is the 80th percentile in Austin, TX

You're comparing household income to individual income. If you look at individual income, $100k/yr in Austin is much going to be much higher than 80th percentile.

>you define middle class as the middle of the income distribution

I don't think that's a good definition for the middle class. There's strong support for the fact that income distribution is an exponential distributions - just google "income distribution exponential".

A exponential distribution is not symmetrical, so its mean or median is not a great centrality measure, it does agree with intuitions developed from observing, say, a normal distribution (like the weight or height of persons). The mean or median are very far from the mode (the most frequent individual) in an exponential, whereas they're almost identical in a normal.

Nitpick: When people talk in terms of class, that traditionally encompassed far more than monetary wealth. It's also your education, your status, your social circle, your distance from aristocracy, etc.

This is changing rapidly as housing costs skyrocket in anywhere remotely urban.

Top 20% is the new middle class in CA and other housing regulated markets

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