A Look at the Slow, Silent Death of America’s Middle Class

And also, driving up the rent and increasing traffic.

What does it help if you flood the labor market more than it already is? Prices may go down 20%, but if your salary goes down 50%, does it really help?

The oversupply of labor is the root cause of the problems you mention, not the solution!

I do think it would solve issues like entitlement insolvency. And also just generally increase our tax base.

Immigrants are net positive on the economy.

The policies are firmly steeped in racism. Just look at Ukraine. People from below our border have also been facing hell. Not as large scale or with big booms. But more sadistic and vicious.

So in other words, a constantly growing population.

in a finite space with finite resources.

I see a problem here.

I'm pro immigration, "free movement of goods and labor" is a basic human right. I'm more pessimistic about our whole economic system which is built on the assumption of a growing population.

Nobody should ever rent because it does not build capital. It can be a sensible solution if you actually do have a lot of capital. I doubt that is too widely spread.

Immigration can be positive or negative for the lowest income class. They don't have the expectations of the domestic population and can severely decrease income in low-income jobs and they increase competition here. "They build houses" is not really too realistic in my opinion. It is mostly beneficial for the better off classes that actually can pay for care.

Sure, the middle class does benefit from cheap labor which immigration provides... But not to the degree large capital owners do.

Note that most people don't go to elite schools. In particular, the middle class (almost by definition) doesn't go to elite schools.

This is some weird gaslighting.

What we need is wage inflation to readjust prices and you're talking about how to continue to keep wages suppressed, which would not help the people who have fallen out of the middle class.

Immigration isn't going to decrease the prices of housing, except for providing cheap labor, which is just exploitation.

I actually agree with more permissive immigration standards (because ultimately I believe in a world without borders and free movement of people that we need to get to eventually), but you're trying to cheap immigrant labor as a club against the working class to keep prices down. That is an upper class concern.

At this point wages must rise so that people can afford things again, or else the massive decades-long asset bubble really needs to fall. And its possible that we do have a worker shortage now caused by the effects of the pandemic which are going to allow workers to have bargaining power. That kind of inflation is what we desperately need, and trying to prevent it via importing cheap labor is an argument that the elite would make.

And this is likely to be an actually extraordinarily unpopular opinion on this forum. Everyone is terrified of inflation and is about to explain to me why a wage-price spiral would be terrible for everyone and hurt the working class (but as long as wage inflation outpaces commodities inflation and asset bubbles in housing that is good in the long run for the working person, while all other roads are just terrible pain for workers short term and long term). That's why I think the central bank will throw the brakes on hard at some point and pop the asset bubble and create a truly massive economic crash (unless other policy measures suffice to get wage inflation back under control again, like dramatically increased immigration).

If you're don't have a law that treats people equally probably yes.

> Last caveat I'll say is immigrants have produced extreme value and innovation in tech. They are intelligent and dilligent. They just arent good for the american middle class.

You do realize that people in tech probably belong to the middle class right?

Typically, when a group of people has a common interest like this, it makes sense for each individual to join forces with the others. Ideally they'd then get this sort of rule codified as a law. Of course, the joining of forces of individuals somehow has a bad rap in the US...

Broadly speaking the US left is libertarian on social issues and authoritarian on economic issues, and the right is reversed. However US culture has an ingrained individualist streak where there is general bipartisan agreement on “support for small business”, which encourages lower taxes, lower regulations, etc. that help capital and hurt labor. So the left tries to preach certain things but is stymied by the size of their tent and the contradictions of US culture.

You can see the same story over and over. The right typically dislikes large government yet has knee-jerk support for the military, a giant money sucking boondoggle in so many ways yet is sacrosanct. And on and on.

Are you saying that immigrants are interchangeable?

Here's another overarching theme/cause that's often missed in these discussions.

Financialization of corporate sector.

There was this well known push by wall-street to show more and more profits which most of the big corporations succumbed to. The phrase is "maximising share holder value". This in turn lead to cutting down costs which has had big cascading effect such as outsourcing, cutting down on pension funds etc.,

What's not that well known is that about 30% of the corporate profit of US firms is now purely from financial investments and activities. Most of this money does not make it to the real world economy and people. I can go on for quite a bit longer on this topic but I'll let you form your own opinion.

Here's a good short video as a jump off point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIk7WlINPQ

If that interests you then here's a good little book "Capitalizing on Crisis":

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674066199

Focusing on full employment meant wage growth was persistent since it was always in high demand, which worked because it was paid for by the gains in innovation from those workers, and the rest of the world was catching up and created demand creating a cycle. The cycle eventually became unsustainable because at some point innovation gains could not keep up with inflation and the world became more competitive as everyone caught up. Labor had a lot of power in this regime but if it was not worth it for capital to invest since there was no return, they would stop investing because the scales of power tipped too far in the favor of labor, which led to unemployment and stagflation.

The response to this was to shift monetary policy towards taming inflation and creating price stability. The pendulum swung hard in the other direction against labor. Interest rates were jacked up and the financial system was liberalized to entice lending, women are entering the workforce and immigration is taking off and capital (and labor) was going international to where it got the greatest return. Inflation was crushed, the power of domestic labor was gutted but interest rates were still high, which led to the financialization of the economy because lending became so incredibly profitable. Everyone wanted money because they were previously credit starved, and everyone wanted to lend money because it was so profitable. Since price stability and taming inflation were the goals of policy and liberalized credit gave the gains that traditionally went to the working class to the developing world, wage stagnation was inevitable, which put a hard limit on growth unless growth was to be increasingly fueled by more debt. Inequality shifted dramatically because gains on capital were very high and gains in labor were very limited, and limited to those who interacted with the financialization of the economy (finance that ran the system, technology that innovated the system and the other industries that worked in tandem like big law).

This led to 2008 when everything was so levered that things started to fall apart, but instead of letting it fall apart, governments wanted to keep the sinking ship alive, and so central banks stepped in to provide the liquidity to keep things afloat. Keeping things afloat exacerbated the problems that the system perpetuated, only now it is being pushed to the extreme because the only way forward is even more debt which creates even more inequality which is where we are now where we have crushed interest rates to keep the party going and can barely raise them without blowing up the economy, and the rise of working class populist movements across the developed world.

This is basically a summary of a lecture given by Mark Blyth on the subject which can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJoe_daP0DE

No: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

Slavery is one of the worst atrocities in human history and diluting it to voluntary work for luxury goods is offensively downplaying history.

It’s no different than calling leering “rape”.

I’m terrified of what will happen when the 50-somethings retire.

Marketing exacerbates the issue by priming us for status constantly and muddying the values that would pull us in a healthier direction (i.e. marketing that portrays brands and products in relational terms, like the recent Taco Bell commercials where friends are abandoned for a burrito). But it still would be an issue.

More pressing I'd suggest than marketing is the atomization and alienation of society, where the only way to achieve one's relational needs is seen - consciously or not - as through consumption. A more connected and calm people would be less susceptible to marketing bs, and hypertrophied status concerns would be balanced by the values (and reality) of relating and belonging, and of (real world rather than market) achievement and power.

There is no "I work less or give away my excess money" to preemptively avoid the brainwashing game.

It is absolutely an aspirational thing of people made to believe they _need_ that space or that they will 'look poor' without the square footage.

I would even go as far as say that, I think the increase in housing square footage in US/Canada and the increase in SUVs and SUV tonnage are a big factor in why the US/Canada are not on par with other developed nations in terms of carbon emissions.

The average US house is 1660 square feet, to my knowledge most middle class families in Europe live in houses under 900 square feet and they still have room for baby rooms and WFH offices.

I've heard it several times here on HN before. The greatest minds of a generation are working on adtech. It's important to also note that the best minds of previous generations spent their careers working on war machines.

I think that is the greatest part of the whole Kennedy Apollo story. It's easy to assume that the decision to go to the moon was the difficult one. There were many reasons leading the US to need to do something during that time to stay in the space race. The big thing Kennedy did for us all was to choose to make it a civilian program and not a military one done in secret.

We are at another inflection point in history now. We can choose to do something great together, as civilians, to bring us together (climate change comes to mind), or we can build more war machines and re arm all of Europe, again. It seems as though we are going to go down that path.