I think how the ‘middle class’ (a relative measure) of the USA is doing is fairly uninteresting overall. I think most meaningful progress at the grand scale (decades to centuries) is how fast is the bottom getting pulled up and how high can the very top end (bleeding edge researchers) go. Shuffling in the middle results in much wailing and gnashing of teeth but doesn’t move the needle much. Their main impact is just voting for dumb stuff that harms the top and bottom.
Economic growth likely isn’t stagnating, it just looks that way due to some catch up growth effects:
https://rhsfinancial.com/2019/01/economic-growth-speeding-up-or-slowing/
Seems like there’s dispute about this, at least from Russ Roberts’ perspective:
https://www.policyed.org/numbers-game/hows-middle-class-doing/video
https://www.policyed.org/numbers-game/paradox-household-income/video
I think how the ‘middle class’ (a relative measure) of the USA is doing is fairly uninteresting overall. I think most meaningful progress at the grand scale (decades to centuries) is how fast is the bottom getting pulled up and how high can the very top end (bleeding edge researchers) go. Shuffling in the middle results in much wailing and gnashing of teeth but doesn’t move the needle much. Their main impact is just voting for dumb stuff that harms the top and bottom.
Great point.
I like the Russ Roberts videos as demonstrations of how complicated macro is / how malleable macroeconomic data is.