Writer Asks: Can the Middle Class Be Saved?

[alp227]

Run time: 08:46 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5_CYxYDB_g   Posted on YouTube: September 02, 2011 By YouTube Member: PBSNewsHour Views on YouTube: 50   Posted on DU: September 02, 2011 By DU Member: alp227 Views on DU: 1027

 
The cover article in the latest issue of The Atlantic Magazine asks: "Can the middle class be saved?" Jeffrey Brown and the author of the article, Don Peck, discusses what he sees as the erosion of America's middle class. ()

Peck also published a book on the topic, Pinched: How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It.

[paulkienitz]

1. the "middle class" could soon be white collar only

He makes a good point: it's not that the "middle class" is going to be destroyed, so much as that it's going to be drastically narrowed to just white collar professionals... and despite much ballyhoo about post-industrial information economies, that population is not going to be anywhere near any kind of broad majority.

As a white-collar professional myself, this helps me breathe a bit of a sigh of relief on purely selfish grounds... but even I am coming up soon on a year out of work. So even though he expects things to recover well for us, we're still getting downward wage pressure. If I'm thinking about asking for less than I earned on my last job even with one of the most desirable skillsets in the workforce, I can't imagine how bad it would be if I were still mowing lawns and planting sprinkler pipes for a living... demand for labor is fundamentally inelastic and it takes an awfully big differential in wages to make a small change in employment rates when we're competing for jobs, or all "freely negotiating" our salaries as individuals.

If things keep getting worse, it might actually make sense to move to Mexico or India, where the pay is even lower but at least you can live really cheap.