The Economy Is Great. The Middle Class Is Mad | Hacker News Reader

The Economy Is Great. The Middle Class Is Mad

time.com

9 pointsmonsieurpng7 comments

What middle class? None of the younger people from the article are middle class. Struggling to pay rent is not a middle class activity. And Techer/Nurse are not good jobs given the low pay (not just compared to other "profressional" jobs but compared to manual jobs once you take into account the cost of student loans and time lost to study).

The problem here is people who are working class (a class lower than their parents) but somehow think they are middle class. You've been demoted but no one told you. Sorry.

I agree that your definition is more useful. In the article they define 'middle class':

> whose incomes fall in the middle 60% of American incomes, which is what Brookings defines as the middle class

So we have a conflict of definitions: your socioeconomic definition, and this purely statistical definition. Evidently, many people somewhere got the idea that these two should roughly correspond to each other.

Here in the UK it is more and more common to equate earned income and wealth/richness. But it has rarely been less true: a combination of income taxes, student loans, other work-associated costs and housing costs for people that don't own outright mean that you can be on a very high gross income and have little to no disposable income or safety cushion. Meanwhile we have pensioners complaining they only get 12k a year when all their housing, property taxes, travel, heating and other costs are taken care of and that's basically £1000 a month for groceries and fun-money...

Those used to be middle class jobs in most cases though. Don’t you think that’s a problem?

I am not sure if that is a problem or rather whether its a solvable one. It's more a reality of modern capitalism. You get rich by OWNING things (like those parents with 4 houses) NOT by working. There are no "middle class jobs" anymore IMHO...

Isn't part of the problem here that bureaucrats measure and define their own metrics. They have every incentive to report that their policies are effective.

There are also malign incentives around Cantillon effects and central planning generally.

An incumbent will celebrate economic performance under his reign. He can freely cherry pick flattering statistics and his supporters will repeat the same. The state of the economy is immaterial.

Opposition politicians will claim that the incumbent's central planning policies are to blame. When in office the roles reverse. Even if the opposition gives lip service to laissez-faire policies, special circumstances requiring central planning always seem to emerge. Opponents of laissez-faire cite this behavior as proof of debunking.

Regardless of who is in charge, the Fed chair will pick a number and price fix the rate of interest. Partisans squabble. Court economists rationalize. Somewhere beyond this charade economic production happens.

Of course the middle class is mad. It's dying. And, as the article correctly points out, how the middle class is doing is a very good indicator for the health of the economy.

A big part of this is that we seem to have (in the US) geared our system to prioritize the interests of the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

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