Class Consciousness

In a reversal of stereotypes, “Democrats have become a party of the wealthy” admits Fredrik deBoer in the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Republicans–much to the chagrin of some Republican “elites”–have become a party of the working class.

The Antiplanner was reminded of this when I saw a report saying that 29.4 percent of Americans were now “upper middle class,” which the report defines as having incomes of $100,000 or more for a family of three (or roughly $82,000 for a family of two, $115,000 for a family of four, etc.–see page 3 of the report). This highlights something the Antiplanner has said several times before: the real social divide in America is not between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, but between the 30 percent and the 70 percent. Specifically, about 30 percent of working-age Americans are “knowledge workers,” and generally have college degrees, while 70 percent do physical labor, and generally don’t have college degrees.

As the Antiplanner has previously noted, there is a lot of confusion about the term “middle class.” Surveys show that nine out of ten Americans consider themselves to be middle class, but in fact, six of them are wrong. Class is not distinguished by income, though it certainly influences income. The Antiplanner spent the first 20 years of my career earning a very low income, but I was college educated with college-educated parents and definitely had middle-class attitudes (never mind the fact that many of my peers scorned the “middle class” even as they formed a part of it).

Thus, when you read articles or listen to stories about the “hollowing of America’s middle class,” they don’t mean something is happening to the college-educated middle class. They mean that middle-income families are declining in importance as incomes are bifurcating into those with college educations having upper-middle incomes (or better) and those without having lower-middle incomes (or worse), with fewer having middle-middle incomes.

This is in sharp contrast to the 1950s and 1960s, which were a sort of golden age for the middle incomes, and a time when the distinction between middle class and middle income was blurred. After World War II, the United States was the greatest industrial power in the world, as the rest of the world had to rebuild (or build) its industrial capacity almost from scratch. With huge amounts of capital and raw materials, labor was the scarcest of the three main factors of production. This raised working-class incomes, perhaps for the first time in history, to be nearly equal to middle-class incomes.

As Japan, Germany, and the rest of the developed world recovered or (in the case of Korea, Taiwan, and other countries) developed their industrial capacity, working-class labor wasn’t so scarce anymore. This is because it is easy for companies to hire people in other countries for working-class jobs, but much more difficult to hire people in other countries for middle-class jobs. The result, as the Antiplanner previously calculated, was that the difference in incomes between people with no college education and people with bachelor’s degrees or better grew from 65 percent in 1970 to 171 percent in 2009. Figure 5 of this Census Bureau report shows that education today has a far bigger influence on incomes than age, race, sex, or other factors.
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Of course, it was only possible for American companies to hire workers overseas because of free-trade laws supported by the free-trade consensus of upper-middle-class liberals and conservatives. While economic theory says that free trade leads to more jobs, it doesn’t say that it leads to less income inequality, and it appears to do the opposite.

The United States could have responded by undertaking a crash program to get a higher percentage of people into the middle class. Instead, it went in the opposite direction. The G.I. Bill put working-class people like my father through college. College was still cheap when I graduated from a state university in 1974: tuition, books, room, and board for four years cost less than $5,000, or about $28,000 in today’s money. The huge increase in tuition costs since then have become a major barrier that keeps young people in working-class families from stepping up to the middle class.

Once out of school, working-class people faced more barriers. Richard Florida made a career of advising cities that they need to attract the “creative class.” Who are the creative class? According to Florida, they are people who engage in knowledge-based occupations” and form “roughly 30 percent of the workforce.”

In other words, what he calls the creative class is really just the middle class. When city officials say they want to attract the creative class, what they are really saying is they want to discourage the working class from moving to those cities. One way of doing that is high housing prices, and urban areas containing around 40 percent of American housing have artificially inflated housing costs thanks to urban policies designed to attract the creative class (and discourage the working class).

These changes influenced both the Brexit debate and the 2016 presidential campaign. The latter has seen a failed revolt in the Democratic party consisting of young people upset about the 1 percent and a successful revolt in the Republican party consisting of white working-class people upset about the 30 percent. I think the first revolt was unsuccessful because the 1 percent is the wrong target.

While 70 percent is greater than 30 percent, the white working class is only 40 percent of the general population, so the election will be decided by whether Trump can either broaden his appeal to working-class minorities or a significant share of the 30 percent. Even if he loses, the world won’t be the same, and whoever runs this country for the next few years will have to find a way to fix our class system as well as our economy, or face even greater revolts in the future.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

6 Responses to Class Consciousness

  1. LazyReader says:

    A closer contest among this years election would be: Who will bankrupt America first, Trump or Clinton? Trump’s a contender because he promises a trade war. That’s what gave us the Great Depression. Trump claims that China is “raping” America. No, Donald, rape is force. Your proposed tariffs are also force. Trade is voluntary and good. Big difference. Clinton however might bankrupt America first, however, because Democrats promise more regulation and handouts, free college, free pre-K, higher minimum wage, etc. Similar activist government spending is what destroyed Puerto Rico. The following week, Puerto Rico defaulted on $370 million worth of bonds. The territory’s “generous” government squandered the island’s resources. Decades of leftist governors hired their friends. In Puerto Rico and Greece, about one in four workers works for government, compared to 14.6 percent in the mainland U.S. and in the years that followed, it’s debt consumed 15% of it’s GDP to nearly 100%.

    What’s even more disturbing is how unemployable these democrats are outside politics. Ever since last year when some reports and info came out and it was discovered Sanders never had a legitimate full paying job until he was pushing 40 years old. Can you even imagine spending your teens, your twenties and your thirties perpetually broke, burrowing from others, crashing on other peoples couch. Back then you used to get rich by working, then get into politics, now people get into politics to get rich. Look at Sanders, no wonder he wants to be President, one years salary as President would wipe out all his personal debts for a man who’s always consecutively broke and whose sole source of income has been the American taxpayer. Despite a prestigious degree, however, Sanders failed to earn a living, even as an adult. It took him years to collect his first steady paycheck and it was a government check. Kicked out of a hippy agrarian commune for being too lazy. Do you have any idea how lazy you are to be “lazy” by hippy standards.

    There’s an old story: An older business man is watching TV. Upon changing the channel he notices a man his age is running for political office; a liberal the business man does not particularly support or like very much. The man is also seasoned, 20 years of political experience. The business man watching in distaste looks upon his charming smile and his never ending list of promises; and says “If I were twenty years younger, I’d take a shot at running for office”. But why didn’t he? It should be noted at some point he was 20 years younger and he could’ve easily ran for office; but chose not to. In that same 20 year timeframe the politician was pursuing higher and loftier office titles, the businessman created a business, products and services, created jobs, opportunity, wealth for himself and others. The politician spent 20 years creating nothing. People that take charge of their own lives go into business; People that take charge of other peoples lives go into politics.

    Today’s democrats do not believe in the principles that our forefathers fought for in the American Revolution. More like the principals of the Russian revolution, making government bigger and reassure the people they’ll be less intrusive, or that the government will be less wasteful with more money, less corrupt with a larger government body. The only thing they’ve done is tell kids how unfair life is when they grow up and become adults. Sanders/Clinton’s America is about extending your childhood. In essence like Peter Pan, their vision of America is Never Neverland. Where you don’t grow up, have no responsibilities, and grown ups are big meanies. Despite being old fogies output an aura of perpetual youthfulness and attracts a like minded cadre of Lost Boys and Girls.

  2. CapitalistRoader says:

    ” Trump’s a contender because he promises a trade war. That’s what gave us the Great Depression. Trump claims that China is “raping” America. No, Donald, rape is force. Your proposed tariffs are also force. Trade is voluntary and good. Big difference.”

    Does he? Much of what Trump says is hyperbole and indicates a continuation of Obama’s trade policies. That’s not to say that the Trump/Hillary choice isn’t a choice between dumb and dumber because it certainly is. Maybe all we can hope for is a change of parties, both being corrupt. New York City, which does change parties every once in a while, is argueably better governed than Chicago, which hasn’t changed parties since 1933.

  3. OFP2003 says:

    Wow, Lazy Reader, You’re not a “lazy writer” !! Write the editor, get your thoughts out there. Put your thoughts/words on top of cool pictures and flood Facebook with them!

  4. JOHN1000 says:

    “Trump can either broaden his appeal to working-class minorities …”

    Contrary to the group-speak of Hillary and the media, Trump has significant support from working class minorities (and women voters).
    Democrats like Hillary think all blacks should be getting government handouts (bribes to vote for her) and that all Hispanics are (or should be) illegal immigrants. The Democrats have to control the information media and hide the fact that they care little and do nothing for working-class Blacks and Hispanics.
    Trump speaks crudely and shoots from the hip, but he actually thinks of these people as human beings, not pawns to keep Hillary-type Democrats in power.

  5. C. P. Zilliacus says:

    Thoughtful essay. Thanks for sharing it.

    As some of you know, I am a lifelong Democrat (capital “D”) since I first voted at age 20 (I was not able to vote the year I turned 18 because my birthday is after the general election day), but I have been accused of being “conservative” and “Republican” more than a few times.

    I am a Democrat for a few reasons, even though I disagree with much of what the party is “selling.” In my state of Maryland, being Republican usually means being in the minority and ignored (even though we currently have a GOP governor).

    Note that generalizations follow.

    1. Democrats do not pander to religious fundamentalists.
    2. Democrats do not pander to anti-abortion crazies.
    3. Democrats are not trying to (re)fight the Civil War.
    4. Democrats do not pander to gun rights absolutists (and I reject claims that guns mean that people can defend themselves against the federal government with commercially available firearms – as long as that government has the weapons that it does, the government will always win).
    5. Democrats seem to be interested in immigration reform, which we badly need.
    6. The GOP appears genuinely uninterested in helping the middle class.

    What I dislike about Democrats include some of these things.

    7. Pandering to anti-growth and no-growth groups such as the ones that dominate local politics in many of our coastal metropolitan areas.
    8. Selling the notion that rail transit will solve all suburban and urban problems.
    9. Trying to make suburban areas look and feel urban (this usually does not work).
    10. Generally subscribing to anti-highway ideology.
    11. Thinking that all young and future residents desire to live in small and cramped apartments.
    12. Pandering to public employee unions.
    13. Fudging and kicking the can down the road on those public employee pension plans.

    That’s probably enough.

  6. CapitalistRoader says:

    Democrats certainly do pander to religious fundamentalists.

    Re: Citizens being defenseless against the superior firearms of the national government, this guy has a different thought:

    And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?

    Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

    After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.

    The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

    –Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The GULAG Archipelago

    Also, you may want to read up on the Warsaw Uprising or perhaps why there was no corresponding invasion of Switzerland or the need for a Zurich Uprising:

    Halbrook details in Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II, the Swiss militia policy of a rifle in every home deterred a Nazi invasion. A Nazi attack would have cost far more in Wehrmacht blood than did the easy conquests of the other European countries, whose governments had restricted firearm ownership before the war. Many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Swiss — and refugees who found sanctuary there — were saved because every Swiss adult male had a rifle, and was prepared to resist.

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