It seams to me as period of 50s to 90s contributed as a blip. Yeah, the American middle class doing artificially well. Europe was still rebuilding from WW2. The

It seams to me as period of 50s to 90s contributed as a blip. Yeah, the American middle class doing artificially well. Europe was still rebuilding from WW2. The Soviet Union wasn't really a match (despite the pretenses). Rest of the wold with filled with poor counties with terrible with repressive regimes. At the time the US had a liberal business climate compared to other parts of the world. As a result a lot of industry was created and exported via culture. What's happened since is that rest of the world caught up. Europe is no longer rebuilding. Soviet Union fell apart freeing a lot of nation states to purse western ideals. In Asian countries the regimes got softer and also liveried their economies. So there's a lot more competition. Globalization became possible and practical. In the US life expectancy went up (medication and not smoking) so that made generous defined benefit programs a lot less practical. Women and African Americans can now do a lot of the jobs that were reserved for white middle class males. All of these things contributed to white middle class American males losing out compare to what they had before. Baby boomers and before just happened to be in the right place / right time.