4 ms·

I like the polyester metaphor, but this phrase: "Our era's particular neoliberal hyper-connected, hyper-capitalist economy is creating a lot of profit for a fe

I like the polyester metaphor, but this phrase: "Our era's particular neoliberal hyper-connected, hyper-capitalist economy is creating a lot of profit for a few people.." I feel is off base: the last 20 years has seen the absolute carpet-bombing of the very definition of American middle class. An entire new layer of workers (tech workers in their tens upon tens upon tens of thousands) make salaries that blow the old-trend / old-trajectory middle class out of the water. I understand that the modern tech world has created billionaires in astonishing numbers, but I dislike skipping over the part where vast numbers of people in America are making in some cases full-on double what a without-them income trajectory would see for our middle class. FAANG salaries aren't representative - I get it. But those FAANG salaries are being paid to vast numbers of people - and salaries that what I'll call a "conventional" middle class person blanches at. Tech cities are experiencing massive inflation in no small part due to this entirely new explosion of what we have to now call the new "upper middle class," at a scale that is unprecedented in the moderate-range past. Tech has created a wild number of billionaires - I understand that. But it has also created an entirely new, and substantially large, additional income-demographic slice that didn't exit much before. So to disagree with the author, tech has created unprecedented wealth for a very large number of people.

protocolture 1y ago
Agreed. Depends on your definition of wealth, but there are a lot of people who are wealthier because of tech. Even the aircon installers going around replacing analogue controls with digital are making bank.
- gsf_emergency 1y ago
  The question of whether these developments are a net positive for meritocracy seems unclear. It's tho, nothing compared to crypto-- many got propelled into a different class whom I have trouble wanting to give my precious attention to... (I also get the robotech ref, thanks for the nostalgia!)
decimalenough 1y ago
The class of well-paid FAANG employees is not that large: I'd guessestimate that all five combined employ ~100,000 engineers in the US, give or take. Yes, they have many more employees in total, but many of these are not well-paid engineering roles and/or are not in the US. If we generously assume that there are 3x as many engineers employed at various non-FAANGs that pay competitive salaries, we still only get ~400,000 people, or around 0.1% of the population of the US. There's one, maybe two major cities in the US where this has visibly impacted the entire local market: SF and Seattle. Everywhere else tech employment is more or less a rounding error. Just to confirm I'm not pulling these figures entirely out of my ass, Pew Research says the "upper-income tier" has grown from 14% in 1971 to 21% in 2021 (+7%), but the "middle class" (median income $90k in 2021 dollars) has shrunk from 61% in 1971 to 50% (-11%) in 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-american-middle-class-has-changed-in-the-past-five-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-a...
- hansvm 1y ago
  It's also visible in Austin, your broader point notwithstanding.
- alwa 1y ago
  So the [middle + upper] tier has shifted from 75% to 71%, for a 4% net drift downward? While 7% have drifted upward from [middle + lower] classes to upper? The Pew link is fascinating me, thank you for sharing it! One thing that stands out to me is just how extreme the upper-class skew is—its median being 10x the median lower-class income. That helps me contextualize the types of graph that describe the “decline of the middle class” as a share of total wealth: it makes it seem more like a story of “lots of middle-class families’ wealth is wealthy in global terms and also growing, but a shocking number of families have shockingly much money too.” To some degree a story of middle class decline relative to the people richer than them—but to an even greater degree, a story of a burgeoning upper class. Certainly you’re right that highly-paid tech workers are a drop in that bucket. To me, though, the overall numbers frustrate the “decline of the middle class” narrative to some extent. I guess it’s considerably worse to sink from prosperous classes to lower-class than it is to rise from the middle to the upper class—still, the net slice of the population affected by the change is smaller than I would have guessed.
vrx-meta 1y ago
It's all relative. It has made a LOT for a few people and sure a lot for many. The pay increases exponentially up the corporate hierarchy. Maybe, the author is trying to highlight that.
jrflowers 1y ago
>An entire new layer of workers (tech workers in their tens upon tens upon tens of thousands) make salaries that blow the old-trend / old-trajectory middle class out of the water. You make a good point. Tens of thousands is a huge number, that’s gotta be like what, most people? Probably at least half of the total number of people. Now I personally don’t have the time or attention span to count all of the people but I don’t reckon that the number of them is so big that “tens of thousands” doesn’t make up an enormous percentage of everybody. There would have to be so many people that I wouldn’t be able to picture them all, which is preposterous, so tens of thousands has to be astronomical in the grand scheme of things
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

protocolture 1y ago

Agreed. Depends on your definition of wealth, but there are a lot of people who are wealthier because of tech. Even the aircon installers going around replacing analogue controls with digital are making bank.

gsf_emergency 1y ago
The question of whether these developments are a net positive for meritocracy seems unclear. It's tho, nothing compared to crypto-- many got propelled into a different class whom I have trouble wanting to give my precious attention to... (I also get the robotech ref, thanks for the nostalgia!)

decimalenough 1y ago

The class of well-paid FAANG employees is not that large: I'd guessestimate that all five combined employ ~100,000 engineers in the US, give or take. Yes, they have many more employees in total, but many of these are not well-paid engineering roles and/or are not in the US. If we generously assume that there are 3x as many engineers employed at various non-FAANGs that pay competitive salaries, we still only get ~400,000 people, or around 0.1% of the population of the US. There's one, maybe two major cities in the US where this has visibly impacted the entire local market: SF and Seattle. Everywhere else tech employment is more or less a rounding error. Just to confirm I'm not pulling these figures entirely out of my ass, Pew Research says the "upper-income tier" has grown from 14% in 1971 to 21% in 2021 (+7%), but the "middle class" (median income $90k in 2021 dollars) has shrunk from 61% in 1971 to 50% (-11%) in 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-american-middle-class-has-changed-in-the-past-five-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-a...

hansvm 1y ago
It's also visible in Austin, your broader point notwithstanding.
alwa 1y ago
So the [middle + upper] tier has shifted from 75% to 71%, for a 4% net drift downward? While 7% have drifted upward from [middle + lower] classes to upper? The Pew link is fascinating me, thank you for sharing it! One thing that stands out to me is just how extreme the upper-class skew is—its median being 10x the median lower-class income. That helps me contextualize the types of graph that describe the “decline of the middle class” as a share of total wealth: it makes it seem more like a story of “lots of middle-class families’ wealth is wealthy in global terms and also growing, but a shocking number of families have shockingly much money too.” To some degree a story of middle class decline relative to the people richer than them—but to an even greater degree, a story of a burgeoning upper class. Certainly you’re right that highly-paid tech workers are a drop in that bucket. To me, though, the overall numbers frustrate the “decline of the middle class” narrative to some extent. I guess it’s considerably worse to sink from prosperous classes to lower-class than it is to rise from the middle to the upper class—still, the net slice of the population affected by the change is smaller than I would have guessed.

vrx-meta 1y ago

It's all relative. It has made a LOT for a few people and sure a lot for many. The pay increases exponentially up the corporate hierarchy. Maybe, the author is trying to highlight that.

jrflowers 1y ago

>An entire new layer of workers (tech workers in their tens upon tens upon tens of thousands) make salaries that blow the old-trend / old-trajectory middle class out of the water. You make a good point. Tens of thousands is a huge number, that’s gotta be like what, most people? Probably at least half of the total number of people. Now I personally don’t have the time or attention span to count all of the people but I don’t reckon that the number of them is so big that “tens of thousands” doesn’t make up an enormous percentage of everybody. There would have to be so many people that I wouldn’t be able to picture them all, which is preposterous, so tens of thousands has to be astronomical in the grand scheme of things

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]