The first question is bordering on bad faith. It's nigh-on-tautological that technological advances will ensure that being middle class in 2010 is 'better' tha

The first question is bordering on bad faith. It's nigh-on-tautological that technological advances will ensure that being middle class in 2010 is 'better' than being middle class in 1970. [1] But more air conditioning, computers and even cell phones does not negate the argument that productivity and wage gains have diverged. And how else would one fairly assess, in the aggregate, if workers are being rewarded for their work, than to see if greater productivity is being rewarded with greater wages? And how else does one describe the situation where continued productivity gains were met with low-to-no gains in wealth, other than "stagnation"? For we're not talking about absolute shares of national income here. Economics is no zero-sum gain. There are net increases. There is wealth creation. And we're talking about where this created wealth has gone. And for the last several decades, it hasn't gone to the workers. Even though their productivity has continued to increase and, historically at least, those two have tended to increase together. Framing the situation in terms of your first question is tantamount to the arguments that poverty today isn't a problem simply because, historically, the poor have never lived so well. It's an irrelevant distraction used to keep people from asking the second question. [2] [1] If technological gains stopped delivering improved quality of life, we'd be facing a civilization-level calamity that would render concerns about productivity gains less than irrelevant. Because it would necessarily imply that technological advances had topped out and resources were now becoming scarce. [2] Asserting that questions of economic fairness and health are answered solely by whether today's workers are doing at least as well as yesterday's workers is pretty close to anti-American. To accept that argument, one would have to believe that it's not necessary for hard work to be rewarded. All those "up by your boot-straps" stories are contingent upon harder and smarter work being rewarded. And here we're staring at an economy-wide case where harder and smarter work has simply been the baseline for continued employment. It's no longer "do well and move up." It's "do well or move out."