From someone who lived through the first wave of disruptions (agriculture going to Mexico and auto manufacturing getting disrupted by Japan/moving to Canada/Mexico) in the 1980s/1990s (earlier agreements with Canada then NAFTA), then the second disruption (textiles, light industrial, then everything going to China) in the 2000s (China most favored nation status and WTO) in a heavy industrial/ag state (Indiana) and seeing everyone they knew get wiped out over those 15-20 years...
I can say the sentiment comes from the people who USED to be middle class that are no longer.
The people who are middle class today are rarely the same people.
I find this kind of article hilarious. "Numbers go up! You're not allowed to feel poor or think that there's a problem! Our number is bigger so you must be rich!"
I saw this 10-20 years ago when economists were telling people that inflation is low despite their feelings about inflation. "Our math is correct and you ignorant folks should be grateful for how this economy is managed."
Just because you can produce equations like physicists doesn't mean it's the same field. Ground truth in economics is just as much people as it is anything else.
In the 70's a middle class family had 1 car, a 1200 square foot house, ate out once a month, had less than a dozen sets of clothes per person (most of which were work clothes).
They felt well off, because they were doing fabulously well compared to the 30's which were still lived memory.
And because they felt secure. They did not feel in any danger of losing the essentials of housing, food, clothing and health care.
Now we have a lot more, but we've lost that feeling of security vis a vis housing & health care.
That goes both ways, though. Just because you feel a certain way doesn't mean that's how it is. A lot of people's perceptions of economic performance are more connected to their opinion of the President than to any actual facts.
How people feel matters, of course, but that doesn't mean that the numbers are wrong if they don't match. People's feelings about inflation are not ground truth about inflation, just ground truth about feelings.
How anyone can look at housing costs and say everything is fine look the other way is insane to me. How delusional and/or out of touch do you have to be? And if you enter the market it’s nothing but massive stress and chasing promotions to simply pay some exorbitant mortgage.
> I find this kind of article hilarious. "Numbers go up! You're not allowed to feel poor or think that there's a problem! Our number is bigger so you must be rich!"
When US americans got filthy rich, can the US americans that did not made it rich with the help of globalization complain that the world is taking advantage of them? Go fight your oligarchs, start a revolution.
Yeah this completely ignores the fact that many people would rather work on making things with their hands that they can physically see, rather than pushing numbers around on a spreadsheet.
This article ignores alienation, cost of living, social atomization, enshittification, the police state, and many other factors that contribute to everyone feeling like shit. The liberal intelligentsia need to learn that voters don't care about their numbers and charts, education has been hollowed out and the populace is going to respond to material promises and aggression. Not "hmm well did you consult my graph??"
I wish the author would have done the due diligence of questioning why his data might not have the full story.
- Looking at income without looking at working hours can mask the fact that working more hours looks like income growth at the expense of quality of life.
- where is this money going? Housing spending apparently has not grown, but are these same workers building equity or renting?
- what amount of income is spent on healthcare vs 50 years ago?
- Other quality of life factors? What are low income workers actually getting with their increased wages?
- Is the way with which we characterize inflation giving an incomplete picture of the experience of all income classes (the rich and the poor don't buy the same things, and prices don't shift evenly)
>- Looking at income without looking at working hours can mask the fact that working more hours looks like income growth at the expense of quality of life.
hours worked has gone down in the US in the past few decades, not up.
Globalization played a role but so did bad policy.
When the Obama administration didn’t respond to China dumping below-cost solar on the US, I know many technologists who lost their job and career in the US because they couldn’t compete with companies that didn’t have to follow environmental protection rules.
Americans are addicted to artificially low prices that put the burden of costs on future generations who have to clean up a huge mess.
The article's point isn't that globalization (or policy) didn't play a role, it's that the premise of middle class downfall is false to begin with. See the section under the header "The American middle class was never hollowed out".
You act as if it's an active, deliberate choice to only buy the cheapest possible thing.
The hollowing out of the middle class means most Americans are forcibly dependent on the cheapest possible goods because they don't have disposable income.
It's a vicious cycle and the average consumer is not at fault. Most people would like to buy domestically, but domestic goods are either simply not available or not affordable.
There was always this doublespeak that came to trade deals where they say "globalization is inevitable and uncontrollable and therefore we must make these trade deals to facilitate and guide it to be good."
Of course if it's an inevitable force of nature then it does not need to be facilitated by nor can it be controlled by trade deals. There's no enabling legislation for gravity.
What bothers me about using GDP and Wages as a denominator or a measure of progress is that it ignores the impact of things becoming more expensive (except for inflation adjustments).
In fact, if we paid more for everything except imports, GDP would grow and it would look like we weren't importing as much. If we paid less for imports over the years, and then used them to generate a lot more money (e.g. a computer), it would look like imports were of shrinking importance.
With wages, the OECD definition of "Disposable Household Income"[2] is all income minus taxes, mandatory contributions, and interest on loans. So what isn't excluded? Rent. Childcare. Healthcare. Things that have dramatically increased in price (and also increased GDP).
We can measure everything in dollars, but that doesn't mean that the goods and services represented by those dollars are fungible.
> it will be time to turn once again to the task of reindustrialization
Won’t happen. 1) We don’t think like that as a nation and probably never will again. 2) in order for us to reindustrialize, we would have to have significant purchasers from outside our own economy, which means someone else would be the first world nation and we’d be the third-world nation. The people with money and power in this country are incapable of considering this or are so supremely afraid of this, the will precipitate action to prevent it; namely war.
Which is great for reindustrialization, provided anyone with brains, tools and resources survives on an irradiated planet.
I think the reality is that nimble adaptive companies won by quickly moving production and identifying suppliers in China (ie Amazon/Costco/Walmart/Target).
These are the same companies that are going to quickly identify suppliers and redirect operations to other countries that don’t have massive tarriffs. The same way large American companies adapted to globalization and the pandemic, you’re going to see a quick rapid adaptation where American goods are made in other countries faster than anyone thought possible.
The first comment asks the important question: Why, "despite all of this prosperity, do so many Americans still feel angry, disillusioned and frankly, even cheated"?
One thing which can't be captured by these numbers (no matter how accurate) is when people end up settling for something perceived to be of lower value. So for instance, it might be that my income has gone up faster than the cost of the things I'm buying, but I'd rather buy a house (out of reach) than buy rent.
> One thing which can't be captured by these numbers (no matter how accurate) is when people end up settling for something perceived to be of lower value
This is always going to happen so long as wealth inequality isn't addressed.
we can't possibly compete with (much) cheaper overseas labor, tariffs will do nothing but exclude the US from this cheap labor while other countries continue to benefit from it
eventually more of it will be automated anyway, and areas that saw booms from cheap labor will face similar class crises
there's also this idea that maybe our standard of living needs to regress some ("2 dolls instead of 30"), but you're insane if you believe that this can happen without significant strife and political upheavals... we're already at a point where many young americans feel as though they'll never be able to buy a house
the only "clean" path I can see out of this is some form of universal basic income, which likely has many problems to figure out, but at least doesn't treat humans like fuel for operating machinery
I recently was looking at a 4 speaker switch on monoprice. It was $20 two months ago. Now it's $40. It occurred to me that the parts in this speaker switch amounted to be $2 of raw parts. The simplest of plastic pieces with basic copper wires and metal screws. Yet they were shipping it here and forcing American consumers to pay $20 in taxes instead of possibly claiming an almost $36 profit margin by paying $2 of taxes on raw parts and assembling it here. Now I know it hasn't been long enough but these are the types of opportunities that are now available in the economy. If an assembling plant is there then that creates opportunities downstream to in-source even the raw parts too. Anyway that's just been where my mind goes about these things recently. I generally support free markets.
Cheap labor is a drug. And the west one way or another got hooked on it. But it should be the opposite - labor should be relatively expensive or we will never innovate or automate things.
This article is standing out because it is about American politics and yet didn't make me want to throw up. Whatever this author is doing different is worth copying.
FuriouslyAdrift|9 months ago
I can say the sentiment comes from the people who USED to be middle class that are no longer.
The people who are middle class today are rarely the same people.
msandford|9 months ago
I saw this 10-20 years ago when economists were telling people that inflation is low despite their feelings about inflation. "Our math is correct and you ignorant folks should be grateful for how this economy is managed."
Just because you can produce equations like physicists doesn't mean it's the same field. Ground truth in economics is just as much people as it is anything else.
bryanlarsen|9 months ago
They felt well off, because they were doing fabulously well compared to the 30's which were still lived memory.
And because they felt secure. They did not feel in any danger of losing the essentials of housing, food, clothing and health care.
Now we have a lot more, but we've lost that feeling of security vis a vis housing & health care.
wat10000|9 months ago
How people feel matters, of course, but that doesn't mean that the numbers are wrong if they don't match. People's feelings about inflation are not ground truth about inflation, just ground truth about feelings.
CoastalCoder|9 months ago
It's one thing for their models to suck at fitting historical data or making bad predictions.
But I think your real beef is that their empirical statistics are touted as characterizing the middle class' lived experience, but don't?
ceejayoz|9 months ago
spacemadness|9 months ago
owebmaster|9 months ago
When US americans got filthy rich, can the US americans that did not made it rich with the help of globalization complain that the world is taking advantage of them? Go fight your oligarchs, start a revolution.
gotohelldang|9 months ago
[deleted]
wormlord|9 months ago
This article ignores alienation, cost of living, social atomization, enshittification, the police state, and many other factors that contribute to everyone feeling like shit. The liberal intelligentsia need to learn that voters don't care about their numbers and charts, education has been hollowed out and the populace is going to respond to material promises and aggression. Not "hmm well did you consult my graph??"
matheusmoreira|9 months ago
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
fooblaster|9 months ago
- Looking at income without looking at working hours can mask the fact that working more hours looks like income growth at the expense of quality of life.
- where is this money going? Housing spending apparently has not grown, but are these same workers building equity or renting?
- what amount of income is spent on healthcare vs 50 years ago?
- Other quality of life factors? What are low income workers actually getting with their increased wages?
- Is the way with which we characterize inflation giving an incomplete picture of the experience of all income classes (the rich and the poor don't buy the same things, and prices don't shift evenly)
gruez|9 months ago
hours worked has gone down in the US in the past few decades, not up.
mensetmanusman|9 months ago
When the Obama administration didn’t respond to China dumping below-cost solar on the US, I know many technologists who lost their job and career in the US because they couldn’t compete with companies that didn’t have to follow environmental protection rules.
Americans are addicted to artificially low prices that put the burden of costs on future generations who have to clean up a huge mess.
robotcapital|9 months ago
mystified5016|9 months ago
The hollowing out of the middle class means most Americans are forcibly dependent on the cheapest possible goods because they don't have disposable income.
It's a vicious cycle and the average consumer is not at fault. Most people would like to buy domestically, but domestic goods are either simply not available or not affordable.
jordanb|9 months ago
There was always this doublespeak that came to trade deals where they say "globalization is inevitable and uncontrollable and therefore we must make these trade deals to facilitate and guide it to be good."
Of course if it's an inevitable force of nature then it does not need to be facilitated by nor can it be controlled by trade deals. There's no enabling legislation for gravity.
owebmaster|9 months ago
What should other countries do against VC tech dumping?
smt88|9 months ago
By your logic, Tesla (equally dependent on Chinese pollution and mining) wouldn't employ any technologists.
yesfitz|9 months ago
In fact, if we paid more for everything except imports, GDP would grow and it would look like we weren't importing as much. If we paid less for imports over the years, and then used them to generate a lot more money (e.g. a computer), it would look like imports were of shrinking importance.
With wages, the OECD definition of "Disposable Household Income"[2] is all income minus taxes, mandatory contributions, and interest on loans. So what isn't excluded? Rent. Childcare. Healthcare. Things that have dramatically increased in price (and also increased GDP).
We can measure everything in dollars, but that doesn't mean that the goods and services represented by those dollars are fungible.
1: Table 3 of https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2025-03/gdp4q24-3rd.... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
MaxPock|9 months ago
FuriouslyAdrift|9 months ago
Basically, we mortgaged our future for cash today.
drivingmenuts|9 months ago
Won’t happen. 1) We don’t think like that as a nation and probably never will again. 2) in order for us to reindustrialize, we would have to have significant purchasers from outside our own economy, which means someone else would be the first world nation and we’d be the third-world nation. The people with money and power in this country are incapable of considering this or are so supremely afraid of this, the will precipitate action to prevent it; namely war.
Which is great for reindustrialization, provided anyone with brains, tools and resources survives on an irradiated planet.
daft_pink|9 months ago
These are the same companies that are going to quickly identify suppliers and redirect operations to other countries that don’t have massive tarriffs. The same way large American companies adapted to globalization and the pandemic, you’re going to see a quick rapid adaptation where American goods are made in other countries faster than anyone thought possible.
CurtHagenlocher|9 months ago
One thing which can't be captured by these numbers (no matter how accurate) is when people end up settling for something perceived to be of lower value. So for instance, it might be that my income has gone up faster than the cost of the things I'm buying, but I'd rather buy a house (out of reach) than buy rent.
idle_zealot|9 months ago
This is always going to happen so long as wealth inequality isn't addressed.
micromacrofoot|9 months ago
we can't possibly compete with (much) cheaper overseas labor, tariffs will do nothing but exclude the US from this cheap labor while other countries continue to benefit from it
eventually more of it will be automated anyway, and areas that saw booms from cheap labor will face similar class crises
there's also this idea that maybe our standard of living needs to regress some ("2 dolls instead of 30"), but you're insane if you believe that this can happen without significant strife and political upheavals... we're already at a point where many young americans feel as though they'll never be able to buy a house
the only "clean" path I can see out of this is some form of universal basic income, which likely has many problems to figure out, but at least doesn't treat humans like fuel for operating machinery
hparadiz|9 months ago
dave1999x|9 months ago
ReptileMan|9 months ago
blueflow|9 months ago
spacemadness|9 months ago
TLDR Inflation does not exist.