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> "Your dues will pay for a six figure salary for the union president" rings hollow when your labor led to Bezos' net worth. This illustrates an important poin

> "Your dues will pay for a six figure salary for the union president" rings hollow when your labor led to Bezos' net worth. This illustrates an important point: The upper-class is using the lower-class against the middle-class.

kevmo 5y ago
The upper class is destroying the middle class.
- hirundo 5y ago
  The US middle class is disappearing…into the upper middle class. https://www.aei.org/economics/the-us-middle-class-is-disappearing-into-the-upper-middle-class-but-theres-more-to-the-story/ https://www.aei.org/economics/the-us-middle-class-is-disappe...
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    The AEI doesn't mention it, but a large part of the middle -> upper middle shift is increasing participation in the labor force by women[1]. Which is a good thing! But it doesn't support the claim that the US, as a whole, is moving middle class families into the upper middle class through positive socioeconomic shifts. It merely demonstrates that more labor means more paychecks. [1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
    - bushbaba 5y ago
      Is two income households truly a good thing? A different perspective is that two income households enabled housing costs to rise, rents to rise. And causes the cost of having a child increase due to childcare costs. Overall maybe society is better having 1 parent (male or female) stay at home to raise the children. Or re think our North American living situation ideals of 1 family per house.
      - woodruffw 5y ago
        I think it is, at least from the perspective of human autonomy: independent income sources means freer choices among peoples. However, that opinion of mine is immaterial to this conversation.
    - solveit 5y ago
      But the women were working before, they were just labouring inside the home. Society is realising that having all the women become domestic workers by default is a massive misallocation of resources and correcting course. That is a positive socioeconomic shift.
      - woodruffw 5y ago
        Yep, that's why I tried to distinguish between "workforce participation" and "labor." Women have always labored; they just haven't been paid for it historically. And it is indeed a positive socioeconomic shift. But it isn't the kind that the AEI means to imply: they're a neoconservative foundation that's attempting to post-hoc justify deregulation and de-clawing of federal agencies under false premises.
      - jimbokun 5y ago
        All of that domestic work is being done, in addition to having two full time jobs outside the home. With roughly the same standard of living. Hard to say that's an unalloyed positive.
        woodruffw 5y ago
        This is an excellent point that I hadn't thought to make.
      - mcguire 5y ago
        Is it? Or is it an artifact of how economic measures are unable to capture important socioeconomic factors? Perhaps the only misallocation is the assumption that women were domestic workers and domestic workers were women.
        solveit 5y ago
        That is the misallocation I am referring to. Some women should be theoretical physicists and some men should be domestic workers. The unrealised gains must have been enormous.
    - refurb 5y ago
      Your chart shows that workforce participation by women was already high. And this chart is skewed by the underlying baby boomer generation which made up a bigger percent of the population (which is why you see the downward trend recently - they retired).
  - VictorPath 5y ago
    If a man was making a real income of $95k in 1980, and was then knocked down to $55k, so his wife raises their 1 kid (as the example given), goes back to work and makes $100k - they have moved from middle class to upper middle class. Interesting these charts start in 1980 as well. The average real hourly wage went down from 1972 to 1980, then began a recovery. So when you don't show things were better beforehand, it looks like a constant rise, which it was not.
    - pydry 5y ago
      I had figured since it was the AEI the figures would be intended to mislead.
    - refurb 5y ago
      Not sure I understand your comment as presumably people were staying home with their kid throughout that period? And the entry of women in the workforce happened in the 1970’s. The start date of 1980 might be arbitrary, but you seem to ignore the trend being pointed out.
  - adventured 5y ago
    While that is true to an extent, it drops some very important context. What happened / is happening, is white and asian middle class households have continued to climb into the higher economic tiers over the last 40-50 years. In their place, hispanic households that have rapidly expanded in numbers in the US since the late 1970s are taking over an ever larger share of the middle class demographic. When people claim the middle class has seen no economic gains in the last 40-50 years, they're either lying or painfully ignorant of what's actually occurring: a dramatic and rapid demographic shift. It takes a mere few minutes to dig up the relevant economic data and see how the middle class of ~1980 was nearly entirely white, and many of those formerly middle class whites have now shifted upward in the economic tiers (which you can spot today by looking at the median or average white household net worth vs the national median or average). So what some of that middle class disappearing into the upper classes represents is an ongoing bifurcation by race among the classes. The US middle class will soon be overwhelmingly hispanic, in other words. That's tremendous progress in a sense, given the people it represents often came from third world countries with nothing to their names and speaking little to no English. Will they see continued progress or will their position ossify there? That's the next issue for the new, vast US hispanic middle class for the coming decades. And what about black households over that time? They're being left behind by hispanic household net worth growth and are not seeing nearly the same progress in moving into the middle class. That is going to cause significant political ramifications as hispanic political power in the US continues to expand.
ARandumGuy 5y ago
The whole lower/middle class divide is an arbitrary distinction that only serves to split the broader working class. A white collar programmer has more in common with a janitor then with a CEO.
- Dma54rhs 5y ago
  I think it's absurd take. How many people here are unionised? Not that many but everyone has an opinion what some blue collar workers really want and these are unions. For Euros - American unions are nothing like in Europe.
  - malermeister 5y ago
    American unions are nothing like in Europe because American companies pull shit like this. If European companies had the same attitude towards unions as American ones, our unions would respond more aggressively too.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > The whole lower/middle class divide is an arbitrary distinction that only serves to split the broader working class. A The typical drawing of the line in US discussions within the working class is; the middle class is a distinct economic class with distinct interests, but it is a much narrower and generally (though not entirely, because economic class and wealth are different though correlated things) richer group than the usual US understanding of “middle class”.
- nobodyandproud 5y ago
  I 100% agree, but even in the 1990s and to a fault the degreed programmers were very anti-union.
  - black_13 5y ago
    Not this one.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
dragonwriter 5y ago
> The upper-class is using the lower-class against the middle-class. While true, that is not illustrated by the thing you are pointed to, which is the upper class using the working class against leadership within the working class. The middle class (petit bourgeoisie) is mostly not involved in this instance.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
snarf21 5y ago
The Greatest Trick The Rich Ever Pulled Was Convincing The Middle Class That The Poor Was To Blame.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I find it is more the 5th to 8th income/wealth deciles being temporarily embarrassed 9th decilers, and wanting to believe they will possibly join the 10th decilers someday. The bottom 5 deciles do not have much hope of getting to the top in the first place, they are aiming to get to the middle deciles. Everyone wants to believe they are marching upward, so if they or their children are trending up (no matter that they are probabilistically not likely to get near the very top), they still do not want to lower the ceiling. I feel like this quote summarized a lot of tribal conflict, whether it be delineated along socioeconomic class or race or whatever: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-white-man/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh... Everyone is happy when the tide is lifting all boats, but when some are rising more relative to others, implying some are moving down relative to others, there is inevitable chafing as resources are re-allocated.
  - throwaway2048 5y ago
    the rising tide has stopped lifting all boats decades ago.
    - pope_meat 5y ago
      A bunch of us out here don't even have boats, and these rising tides are just drowning us.
heavyset_go 5y ago
The upper class also uses the middle class against the lower class. They benefit if you forget about them.

kevmo 5y ago

The upper class is destroying the middle class.

hirundo 5y ago
The US middle class is disappearing…into the upper middle class. https://www.aei.org/economics/the-us-middle-class-is-disappearing-into-the-upper-middle-class-but-theres-more-to-the-story/ https://www.aei.org/economics/the-us-middle-class-is-disappe...
- woodruffw 5y ago
  The AEI doesn't mention it, but a large part of the middle -> upper middle shift is increasing participation in the labor force by women[1]. Which is a good thing! But it doesn't support the claim that the US, as a whole, is moving middle class families into the upper middle class through positive socioeconomic shifts. It merely demonstrates that more labor means more paychecks. [1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
  - bushbaba 5y ago
    Is two income households truly a good thing? A different perspective is that two income households enabled housing costs to rise, rents to rise. And causes the cost of having a child increase due to childcare costs. Overall maybe society is better having 1 parent (male or female) stay at home to raise the children. Or re think our North American living situation ideals of 1 family per house.
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      I think it is, at least from the perspective of human autonomy: independent income sources means freer choices among peoples. However, that opinion of mine is immaterial to this conversation.
  - solveit 5y ago
    But the women were working before, they were just labouring inside the home. Society is realising that having all the women become domestic workers by default is a massive misallocation of resources and correcting course. That is a positive socioeconomic shift.
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      Yep, that's why I tried to distinguish between "workforce participation" and "labor." Women have always labored; they just haven't been paid for it historically. And it is indeed a positive socioeconomic shift. But it isn't the kind that the AEI means to imply: they're a neoconservative foundation that's attempting to post-hoc justify deregulation and de-clawing of federal agencies under false premises.
    - jimbokun 5y ago
      All of that domestic work is being done, in addition to having two full time jobs outside the home. With roughly the same standard of living. Hard to say that's an unalloyed positive.
      - woodruffw 5y ago
        This is an excellent point that I hadn't thought to make.
    - mcguire 5y ago
      Is it? Or is it an artifact of how economic measures are unable to capture important socioeconomic factors? Perhaps the only misallocation is the assumption that women were domestic workers and domestic workers were women.
      - solveit 5y ago
        That is the misallocation I am referring to. Some women should be theoretical physicists and some men should be domestic workers. The unrealised gains must have been enormous.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Your chart shows that workforce participation by women was already high. And this chart is skewed by the underlying baby boomer generation which made up a bigger percent of the population (which is why you see the downward trend recently - they retired).
- VictorPath 5y ago
  If a man was making a real income of $95k in 1980, and was then knocked down to $55k, so his wife raises their 1 kid (as the example given), goes back to work and makes $100k - they have moved from middle class to upper middle class. Interesting these charts start in 1980 as well. The average real hourly wage went down from 1972 to 1980, then began a recovery. So when you don't show things were better beforehand, it looks like a constant rise, which it was not.
  - pydry 5y ago
    I had figured since it was the AEI the figures would be intended to mislead.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Not sure I understand your comment as presumably people were staying home with their kid throughout that period? And the entry of women in the workforce happened in the 1970’s. The start date of 1980 might be arbitrary, but you seem to ignore the trend being pointed out.
- adventured 5y ago
  While that is true to an extent, it drops some very important context. What happened / is happening, is white and asian middle class households have continued to climb into the higher economic tiers over the last 40-50 years. In their place, hispanic households that have rapidly expanded in numbers in the US since the late 1970s are taking over an ever larger share of the middle class demographic. When people claim the middle class has seen no economic gains in the last 40-50 years, they're either lying or painfully ignorant of what's actually occurring: a dramatic and rapid demographic shift. It takes a mere few minutes to dig up the relevant economic data and see how the middle class of ~1980 was nearly entirely white, and many of those formerly middle class whites have now shifted upward in the economic tiers (which you can spot today by looking at the median or average white household net worth vs the national median or average). So what some of that middle class disappearing into the upper classes represents is an ongoing bifurcation by race among the classes. The US middle class will soon be overwhelmingly hispanic, in other words. That's tremendous progress in a sense, given the people it represents often came from third world countries with nothing to their names and speaking little to no English. Will they see continued progress or will their position ossify there? That's the next issue for the new, vast US hispanic middle class for the coming decades. And what about black households over that time? They're being left behind by hispanic household net worth growth and are not seeing nearly the same progress in moving into the middle class. That is going to cause significant political ramifications as hispanic political power in the US continues to expand.

ARandumGuy 5y ago

The whole lower/middle class divide is an arbitrary distinction that only serves to split the broader working class. A white collar programmer has more in common with a janitor then with a CEO.

Dma54rhs 5y ago
I think it's absurd take. How many people here are unionised? Not that many but everyone has an opinion what some blue collar workers really want and these are unions. For Euros - American unions are nothing like in Europe.
- malermeister 5y ago
  American unions are nothing like in Europe because American companies pull shit like this. If European companies had the same attitude towards unions as American ones, our unions would respond more aggressively too.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> The whole lower/middle class divide is an arbitrary distinction that only serves to split the broader working class. A The typical drawing of the line in US discussions within the working class is; the middle class is a distinct economic class with distinct interests, but it is a much narrower and generally (though not entirely, because economic class and wealth are different though correlated things) richer group than the usual US understanding of “middle class”.
nobodyandproud 5y ago
I 100% agree, but even in the 1990s and to a fault the degreed programmers were very anti-union.
- black_13 5y ago
  Not this one.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago

dragonwriter 5y ago

> The upper-class is using the lower-class against the middle-class. While true, that is not illustrated by the thing you are pointed to, which is the upper class using the working class against leadership within the working class. The middle class (petit bourgeoisie) is mostly not involved in this instance.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

snarf21 5y ago

The Greatest Trick The Rich Ever Pulled Was Convincing The Middle Class That The Poor Was To Blame.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
I find it is more the 5th to 8th income/wealth deciles being temporarily embarrassed 9th decilers, and wanting to believe they will possibly join the 10th decilers someday. The bottom 5 deciles do not have much hope of getting to the top in the first place, they are aiming to get to the middle deciles. Everyone wants to believe they are marching upward, so if they or their children are trending up (no matter that they are probabilistically not likely to get near the very top), they still do not want to lower the ceiling. I feel like this quote summarized a lot of tribal conflict, whether it be delineated along socioeconomic class or race or whatever: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-white-man/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh... Everyone is happy when the tide is lifting all boats, but when some are rising more relative to others, implying some are moving down relative to others, there is inevitable chafing as resources are re-allocated.
- throwaway2048 5y ago
  the rising tide has stopped lifting all boats decades ago.
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    A bunch of us out here don't even have boats, and these rising tides are just drowning us.

heavyset_go 5y ago

The upper class also uses the middle class against the lower class. They benefit if you forget about them.