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Comment by havelhovel | Hacker News Reader

You can't just define the middle class according to arbitrary income bands, as the presenter in your link does. The middle class is an ideal: a single family home, yearly vacations, pensions, etc. The presenter is pretending like we're complaining about the cost of Netflix subscriptions when we're actually complaining about major expenses like housing and education being less affordable relative to wages over time. I stopped watching after the presenter started comparing silent films to the MCU to prove how great our quality of life is today. It's a wildly disingenuous take and misses the entire point.

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I don’t think it misses the point at all. The world is amazing today, and a larger number of people than ever get to experience an extraordinary standard of living.

And I totally think it’s true that people don’t realize how much they’re spending on modern conveniences that could be easily cut out if they wanted to live more cheaply.

In this particular case, the presenter is talking about the US middle class, and not worldwide trends, where I would otherwise agree with your sentiment.

So I really do think it's missing the point to say that the middle class isn't actually shrinking because we've got all these great new gadgets and services instead of traditional middle class trappings like housing. Compared to prior years, the difference in housing affordability relative to median income is equal to hundreds of maxed-out iPhones. [1],[2] Avoiding a new iPhone purchase or canceling a Blue Apron subscription won't make up the difference. These things aren't priced equivalently, and frugality doesn't work if one is completely priced out of the market.

[1] https://quotewizard.com/news/posts/americas-unaffordable-hou...

[2] https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...

amazing? years ago you could buy a house as a single person for cheap, you could save for retirement easily, no college debt, blablabla. what are you talking about? current and previous generation have it much more difficult than the boomer generation. without insanely high salaries you won't be able to buy a house in the bay area and pay for everything else.

Are you sure you cannot define it that way?

Not saying youre wrong per se, but the problem with these sorts of loose definitions is that one can bend the definition to make whichever point one wishes to.

I think you make a valid point. I also think boiling the middle class down to some percentile range of income leaves us without any reason for the term itself. So maybe the percentile ranges alone aren't actually saying the same thing as "middle class."

But if someone wants to stand in front of a slide deck and explain why people who think the middle class is shrinking for the worse are wrong, I think they should either explain why that definition of the middle class is wrong, or explain why that particular definition of the middle class is not shrinking for the worse. Otherwise they're just talking past each other.

First the income levels he is talking about in the middle class can easily pay for the life style you are talking about both in my area, and the region the Professor is from (PA) so I am not sure what you believe the middle class is

Second it does not matter where you place the income bands, the fact of the matter is people are making more money today then they did in the 1970's out pacing inflation which factors in things like housing prices. People today can afford MORE than people in 1970's did

In some ways the cost of netflix is what people are complaining about, it is sad you discounted everything said simply because you misunderstood the point he was making.

As to education people should be upset not with the cost of education but with the evaporation of good paying jobs that do not need an education. No society can last if the education system can not produce employable workers in 12 years of schooling. The fact that employers are requiring an additional 4 years for the vast majority of good paying jobs shows a clear problem with our government run educational system, so simply adding on 4 more years to the government paid system is likely not going to resolve that problem. However the only thing people are demanded today is free college not fixing the K-12 system so employers will recognize a high school diploma as enough education for the majority of their positions

To close I bet you can find a region, like silicon valley, where this data does not apply, but for the US on the whole people are better off, and if Silicon valley is where people are worse off then maybe it time to move away from the poop ridden streets and come to middle America where things are much better...

How do you know they are being disingenuous rather than just ignorant / incorrect?

Besides the convenient mischaracterization of claims that the middle class is shrinking, I assume a "Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education," with a Ph.D. in Economics, would be aware of everything I wrote above and focus on those more important aspects.

He might not be, but the way he is giving a talk, wearing a suit, has the video up on YouTube, and speaks as if he is very knowledgeable on the matter, if he were to be incorrect or ignorant, it would still have a disingenuous effect on the viewer, even if he doesn't know that he's wrong or ignorant and totally believes his own body odor smells of roses.

And notice I said "if he were to be incorrect or ignorant", I have not tried to fact check or anything what he's saying in the talk, and so I'm making no claim to the accuracy and veracity of it.

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