I absolutely agree with you, but I wanted to check some actual (non-fluffy) metrics to get a clearer picture. What I found was two interesting charts covering

I absolutely agree with you, but I wanted to check some actual (non-fluffy) metrics to get a clearer picture. What I found was two interesting charts covering roughly the period of 1960 to 2020 in the US. The first[1] shows "Real hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory employees", while the second[2] shows both the "Civilian Employment-Population Ratio" (in red) and "Wages and salary / GDP" (in blue). While these don't specifically give much insight into the plight of the middle class, I think a case could be made that as more people entered the workforce, that lead to increased economic growth but proportionally less of that growth was enjoyed by each employee. [1] https://assets.weforum.org/editor/Xkzpnpz_lnI-0WbTH1LJVUdu3JaQrM47Y1BpDDMpXro.jpg https://assets.weforum.org/editor/Xkzpnpz_lnI-0WbTH1LJVUdu3J... [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Goodwin2_fredgraph.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Goodwin2...