{"id":38850,"date":"2013-06-04T08:46:10","date_gmt":"2013-06-04T07:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-middle-class-faces-extinction-so-does-the-american-dream\/38850\/"},"modified":"2013-06-04T08:46:10","modified_gmt":"2013-06-04T07:46:10","slug":"the-middle-class-faces-extinction-so-does-the-american-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-middle-class-faces-extinction-so-does-the-american-dream\/","title":{"rendered":"The Middle Class Faces Extinction\u2013So Does the American Dream"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com\/ baranq<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

June 3, 2013<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
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This article first appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Inequality is now one of the biggest political and economic challenges facing the United States. Not that long ago, the gap between rich and poor barely registered on the political Richter scale. Now the growing income divide, an issue that dominated the presidential election debate, has turned into one of the hottest topics of the age. <\/p>\n

Postwar American history divides into two halves. For the first three decades, those on middle and low incomes did well out of rising prosperity and inequality fell. In the second half, roughly from the mid\u20141970s, this process went into reverse. Set on apparent autopilot, the gains from growth were heavily colonized by the superrich, leaving the bulk of the workforce with little better than stagnant incomes. <\/p>\n

The return of inequality to levels last seen in the 1920s has had a profound effect on American society, its values, and its economy. The United States led the world in the building of a majority middle class. As early as 1956, the celebrated sociologist, C. Wright Mills, wrote that American society had become \u201cless a pyramid with a flat base than a fat diamond with a bulging middle.\u201d <\/p>\n

That bulge has been on a diet. The chairman of President Obama\u2019s Council of Economic Advisers \u2013 Professor Alan Krueger\u00a0\u2013 has shown how the size of the American middle class (households with annual incomes within 50 percent of the midpoint of the income distribution) has been heading backwards from a peak of more than a half in the late 1970s to 40 percent now. The \u201cdiamond\u201d has gone. The social shape of America now looks more like a contorted \u201chourglass\u201d with a pronounced bulge at the top, a long thin stem in the middle, and a fat bulge at the bottom. <\/p>\n

One of the most significant effects of America\u2019s hourglass society has been the capping of opportunities and the emergence of downward mobility amongst the middle classes, a process that began well before the recession. Around 100 million Americans \u2013 a third of the population \u2013 live below or fractionally above the poverty level. A quarter of the American workforce end up in low-paid jobs, the highest rate across rich nations, while the wealthiest 400 Americans have the same combined wealth as the poorest half \u2013 over 150 million people. <\/p>\n

With a growing percentage of the current generation facing a lower living standard than their parents, more and more US citizens express a \u201cfear of falling,\u201d worried about a further loss of livelihood and their relative income status. The nation is at last waking up to what has been reality for years \u2013 the vaunted American Dream (the ability of citizens to go from rags to riches, and one of the country\u2019s most enduring values) is increasingly a myth. <\/p>\n

In a poll conducted for\u00a0The Washington Post\u00a0before the 2012 presidential election, respondents were asked which was the bigger worry: \u201cunfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy\u201d or \u201cover-regulation of the free market that interferes with growth and prosperity.\u201d They chose unfairness by a margin of 52\u201437 percent. The mostly pro-self-reliant American public are perhaps coming to recognize that their much-heralded virtues of hard work and self-help are no longer an effective means to economic advancement. <\/p>\n

The most damaging impact of growing inequality has been on the American \u2013 and global \u2013 economy. It has been one of the central rules of market economics that inequality is good for growth and stability. The idea was enshrined in the postwar writings of the New Right critics of the model of managed capitalism that emerged after the war. \u201cInequality of wealth and incomes is the cause of the masses\u2019 well being, not the cause of anybody\u2019s distress\u201d wrote the Austrian-American economist Ludwig von Mises,\u00a0one of the leading prophets of the superiority of markets, in 1955. <\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com\/ baranq June 3, 2013 \u00a0| Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. This article first appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Inequality is now one of the biggest political and economic challenges facing the United States. Not that long ago, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-38850","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38850\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}