That job market only existed in a handful of countries for a ~40 year period on all of human history.
Saying that should be the norm ignores that historically it wasn't and it may very well be that it isn't a sustainable basis for a society.
I'll take the parent commenter's option, thanks.
right here is the problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
More people = more economy = higher wages. Otherwise killing people and stopping other people from having children would increase your pay.
As for the middle class, most of the reason for the decline is people moving into the upper class.
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/th...
Thats not what I get from the source you provided.
It shows that middle (and lower class) are massively losing income share: Ine 1971, you have 88% of population in middle class or below, with 72% of total income.
81% of population remain in that bracket, but now they only get 51% of total income. That is massive, and also bad for the economy as a trend because rich people spend less of their income.
The conclusion I draw from this is that middle-class (and below) is in decline because the rich "upper-class" is soaking up much of their income.
See page 3 on https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/12/goldin-lecture-sl... for an illustration.
Also worth mentioning that in that time period the rest of the world was recovering from devastation. Either the devastation of two world wars or the devastation of imperialism.
Surely you're not suggesting...
> Surely you're not suggesting...
Indeed I see the evidence on the side that these ideas were some temporary fads that might get out of fashion in the foreseeable future. This is clearly not a suggestion, I just see the signs on the horizon that this is indeed plausibly to happen.
And my grandfather, as a farmer, was up early in the morning and worked all day, never got weekends off. My grandmother was also working all the time - cooking, cleaning, sewing things, gardening. She wasn't employed but that didn't mean she was idle. The kids had to work when they were old enough too.
That was also a pretty decent income for time as well, there were a lot of urban poor living in tiny, crowded little houses.
It's not to say that it's never going to be possible for the mythical postwar boomer lifestyle of leisure (with modern standards of living) to actually available to the bulk of the population but it's going to need a lot more automation and productivity increases (like AI and self-driving cars) to get there, there's no "just tax the billionaires" one-simple-trick or policy that will immediately bring it in.
Stability in that you had jobs that lasted a lifetime and paid a pension once you retired, not layoffs every couple years. Dignity in that anyone could get a real, important, meaningful (and very rough, once you take off said rose-tinted glasses) job as a factory worker, farmer, coal miner, whatever, instead of what, working at Walmart or 7-11?
I do agree with you though, especially your last paragraph.
The typical romanticized coal miner is a masculine figure, a breadwinner, the representative of an industry that might have been core to the family and town for generations. A Walmart stocker is a guy in a T-shirt. Walmart itself is famous for... pricing out local businesses whenever it comes to a small town.
I'm not at all denying that it's a culture and glorification thing. I just think this is a factor people sometimes miss when looking at how a lot of the country is nostalgic for the 20th century economy, and why people keep wanting (mostly via vibes) to reindustrialize America.