This week’s Rolling Stone has an article on the “sharp, sudden decline of America’s middle class.” The only problem is that few if any of the people discussed in the article are in the middle class; instead, they are working class.
As the Antiplanner has noted elsewhere, Americans often pretend to ignore the line between working class and middle class, yet it is very real and difficult to cross. The middle class includes people with college educations and jobs that involve thinking and creating, usually described as “white-collar” jobs. The working class includes people with less education and jobs that require physical labor or repetitive work, usually described as “blue-collar” jobs.
Many people in the middle class have very few working-class friends, so they can’t relate to working-class lives and lifestyles. We imagine that most people are middle class, and only a few unfortunates are in the working class. In fact, less than 30 percent of working-age Americans have college degrees, which is a pretty good proxy for the size of the middle class.
While there are certainly exceptions, the middle class is not suffering much from the current recession. Nor does the middle class have to worry much about traffic congestion (their jobs allow flex time or even working at home) or the increased housing prices caused by land-use regulation (they earn enough money to deduct mortgage interest from their taxes). Even if a middle-class employee loses his or her job, their skills are flexible enough to adapt to another job.
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These problems are serious barriers for the working class. They have less choice about when and where they work; their incomes are less insulated from housing bubbles; and if they lose their jobs, they are less likely to have the skills to get a job in a different field.
Fifty years ago, working-class incomes averaged about 75 percent of middle-class incomes, and in some urban areas (such as Detroit), average working-class incomes were actually higher than average middle-class incomes (thanks to overtime). Working-class families lived next door to middle-class families, drove in similar cars, wore similar clothes, and their children went to the similar schools.
American income inequality bottomed out in the 1960s and has increased ever since. Today, working-class jobs pay less than 65 percent of middle-class jobs. This means it is harder for the children of working-class parents to climb into the working-class, and the real scandal with high college tuitions is not the costs they impose on middle-class students but the way they prevent working-class children from even entering college.
While the story Rolling Stone tells of homeless people is heartrending, it is not a story of America’s declining middle class oppressed by the 1 percent. It is a story of working-class people oppressed by the middle class.
What a load of crap. I know working class people with shit tons of money. They got it because they work hard. What do Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Mark Cuban have in common? They’re college dropouts, & Richard Branson, Simon Cowell and Peter Jennings…never went. But today all of us are told: To succeed, you must go to college. Or that college graduates make over a $1 million more over their lives than non graduates. But for most people college is a scam. There could be no more misleading statistic, that million dollar aspect is boosted by a niche of billionaire super-earners who skew the average, like a fat guy on an elevator, enought to tip the scale. People that go to college are different people….more disciplined, smarter. They probably did way better in high school, or have the tendancy to work harder. Better to go to trade schools or technical schools or apprenticships, getting moderate to high pay almost immediatley. Richard Vedder, author of “Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much,” and Naomi Schafer Riley, who just published “Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For” agree. Riley says some college students don’t get what they pay for because professors have little incentive to teach. Vedder says, You think you’re paying for them to be in classroom, but every hour a professor spends in the classroom, gets paid less. The incentives are for more research. Research often on obscure topics for journals few read like sociology, medicine, etc and sadly lots of people not suited for higher education get pushed into it which doesn’t do them good. They feel like failures when they don’t graduate. Vedder said two out of five students entering four-year programs don’t have a bachelor’s degree even if they stay longer. Why does government let alone colleges accept these students in the first place. Government loans, that’s one reason. They follow the money. There are 80,000 bartenders in the United States with bachelor’s degrees and 17% of baggage porters and bellhops have a degree, 15% of taxi and limo drivers. It’s hard to pay off student loans (let alone interest)with jobs like those so as a result these days, many students graduate with huge debt. What’s so troubing is market forces dont push bad colleges out of business, as long as government pays, you can get away with charging anything. That’s why college tuitions have risen even adjusting for inflation, four times the previous price in the last 30 years. Another problem is the courses they take. That’s why nearly a third or more of the Occupy movement possess degrees or are students, far more people in the college ranks than the Tea Party. One of the OWS movements more absurd demands, student loan debts be forgiven. Why? Well it’s made up of many college types, perhaps because government payed a portion to cover the cost of their education, they became discretionary with what they studied. Now they’ve graduated into an economy that even before the recession didn’t need them much. Degrees for gender studies, sociology, regional histories, African American studies, the liberal arts and whatever, has no major worth. This does not prepare you for the job market. And now these students or grads realize college was really expensive and now they owe thousands/tens of thousands with no prospect of significant revenue to gain or employment with their degrees, they have crap.
“They got it because they work hard. What do Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Mark Cuban have in common? They’re college dropouts, & Richard Branson, Simon Cowell and Peter Jennings…never went.”
This is news-worthy only because it goes against the trend.
“Degrees for gender studies, sociology, regional histories, African American studies, the liberal arts and whatever, has no major worth.”
There are plenty of hard-core degrees out there. Maths, Science, Law, Engineering. The qualifications are worth the cost, and then some.
Yeah if you go to get those degrees. Outside Engineering, Medicine or Law, a lot of these degrees are almost worthless. And even if you get the Law/Medical/Engineering, there’s no guarantee that it will be as successful as you thought let alone the debts. Doctors don’t make as much as we think. Specialists, surgeons and private practice, that can make tons of money. General practitioners on the other make only slightly above that of the average salary. And 20-40% of doctor’s income is spent on logistics (namely paperwork for things like insurance). So many non-medical people work in hospitals, that’s money that could have been spent on more nurses or physicians.
You know who is the largest hirer of mathematicians in America? The federal government. The NSA will gobble up nearly anyone who has a math degree. It’s always been that invisible threat, the Chinese for instance apparently are cranking out more scientists and mathematicians than the U.S. So what. Quality over quantity, they crank out mathematicians that end up working in factories or teaching positions for children despite advanced degrees. America certainly possesses more climatologists than anyone else.
It’s the costs and quality issues that are the problem. Back in 1952, a full year of tuition at Harvard was only $600. The cost of college textbooks has tripled over the past decade. Approximately 14 percent of all students that graduate with student loan debt end up defaulting within 3 years of making their first student loan payment. The typical U.S. college student spends less than 30 hours a week on academics. According to very extensive research detailed in a new book entitled “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses”, 45 percent of all U.S. college students exhibit “no significant gains in learning” after two years in college and about a third of U.S. college students spend 5 hours or less studying per week and nearly half have never taken a class where they had to write more than 20 pages. U.S. college students spend 24% of their time sleeping, 51% of their time socializing and 7% of their time studying but those personal habits and no amount of back breaking compensates for laziness. Ultimately over a third of college grads accept jobs that never required said degree.
While I agree with the Antiplanner’s article I am uncomfortable with the last statement:
“While the story Rolling Stone tells of homeless people is heartrending, it is not a story of America’s declining middle class oppressed by the 1 percent. It is a story of working-class people oppressed by the middle class.”
This gives the impression that there is no problem with the top 1 percent having increased their share of income in the last 35 years and gaining much of the wealth generated during that time, see:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html/
The USA is increasingly being segmented into a very wealthy elite and and a poorer bottom half. Having briefly worked in Mexico I do not want to live in a country where the wealthy control an increasing share of income. Time to start looking at sensible ways (not necessarily increased taxes) on restoring some of this wealth to the lower paid in the the USA. How about bringing back defined benefit pension where some of the wealth of the executives goes into pension plans that invest in the stocks so that the USA wealth increases but benefits all?
That’s BS, the 1% helped create the middle class. The U.S. middle class is still incredibly wealthy by international standards. After 30 years of greed being good and rising tides lifting all boats, inequality or “class warfare,” if you prefer is back on the political agenda. The Occupiers who camped out in central squares from Melbourne to Oakland, denouncing the “1%” for its supposedly ill-gotten gains, have a point: Inequality is out of control. But these mainly middle-class complainers are an incredibly coddled bunch by any international standards of development. This is good news, because we have a real problem to solve. The nearly billion plus people globally who make less than $1.25 a day. First things first: America’s rich are really, really rich. U.S. Census data suggest every man, woman, and child in the top 1 percent of U.S. households gets about $1,500 to live on each day, every day. By contrast, the average U.S. household is scraping by on around $55 per person per day. But the global average is about a fifth of that. So by global standards, America’s middle class are also really, really rich. To make it into the richest 1 percent globally, all you need is an income of around $34,000, according to World Bank. Western middle classes actually get back a good deal more from government than they pay in. Political scientists Vincent Mahler, David Jesuit, and Piotr Paradowski examined the benefits — from pensions to child welfare payments — that taxpayers, rich and poor, in 12 European countries and the United States received. They found that the middle 60 percent of the population had a larger income share after taxes and transfers than before. Thanks to the good folks at the Internal Revenue Service, the broad slice of the U.S. middle class gets 3 percent more of the income pie after taxes and transfers. And that doesn’t account for a range of state subsidies for public goods like colleges and universities that disproportionately benefit the middle classes.
I agree with the LazyReader’s view on college costs and benefit. We educate to many people with degrees of low value and do not train enough people in skill such as machinist. See:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/14/news/economy/manufacturing_rebound_jobs.fortune/index.htm
Could the confusion be that many of the “people with less education and jobs that require physical labor or repetitive work,” were once considered middle class in America?
That is, many of the people who worked in the (now) rust belt were “middle class” at one time.
Two words:
hourglass economy.
DS