[quote=temeculaguy]Yet despite all of the various hand wringing I’ve read throughout my life, the middle class in the U.S. today is as well off as it has ever been in history. With the exception of the lack of concubines and servants, most of us live as well as royalty did a few hundred years ago. Most of us live better than a Doctor or a lawyer did in the 1940’s or 1950’s, at least those of us who aren’t doctors and lawyers.
Be realistic, what was the middle class 30, 40 or 50 years ago? There’s a lot of complaining nowadays that a college degree doesn’t allow you to live worry free about money, but today, a college degree is not that exceptional, it’s kinda middle class. Today, a minimum wage worker can eat all they want, work at a job that isn’t too dangerous and enjoy recreation, media, a car, their own room in perhaps a shared apartment. That is the lower class today, the middle class in the 1950’s meant 6 kids in an 1100 sq ft house, two kids to a bed, not always having enough to eat, having to forgo dentistry and optional medical care and going to work in a factory or some other job where there was a decent amount of risk involved. Today middle class is a 50″ television in the main room and steak whenever you want it.
Now we have hair stylists that can drive a used bmw, get breast implants and take vacations involving flying to other countries. My grandfather was quite successful, owned a business with about a hundred employees and was considered the richest guy in his town of about 30k people. He owned the first swimming pool in his town when he was only 45. He never took a vacation outside the u.s., never owned a remote control, never had about a hundred things that i have now, my house is bigger, my stuff is cooler and my stomach is bigger (unfortunately). But I’m not the richest guy in my town, not even close, yet I had earned more than he ever had by the time I was 27. So if the middle class suffers some setbacks compared to a chart that represents buying power, what is it that people are afraid of? It’s not even been a hundred years since the struggle for survival and food was a real issue and had been since the beginning of man. If I’m lucky I’ve got 40 years left on the planet, my kids might have 70, my grandkids will be gone in a hundred since they haven’t shown up yet. None of us will starve, we will all have more leisure time and more food than we should be allowed, we will always have to join gyms and go on diets because our easy lives aren’t actually good for us. So if in a thousand years, we live like peasants again, I don’t really care, after the next hundred years, it’s none of my business, I wont know any of those people or care about them, that’s their problem. But I’ll bet they are fine.[/quote]
The problem with the hedonics argument is that there is no logical endpoint to the extrapolation. People who use this argument say we have to have two incomes to make ends meet today because we have bigger houses, nicer cars, televisions in every room and cell phones that allow us to talk to anyone at anytime.
This fails because people in the 1950s somehow got by with one income despite having new technologies that people 50 years earlier could only dream of. So why did they get to enjoy the good life with new, amazing gadgets while have a stay at home wife?
To me this discrepancy gives weight to the “globalization is killing the middle class” argument.
