The Middle Class Fallacy Revisited

I already wrote about this before, but I'm going to write about it again.

The middle class is a fallacy.

This is not a diatribe linked to political ideology. I could sit here and regurgitate a whole bunch of facts and figures, and what has happened to the economic standing of the middle class of the past 10 years. I could talk about how that same article released yesterday related American mindset where they blame just about anything and everything -- to big business, to big banks, to Wall Street, the government policy, to Obama, to Bush, and so on. I've already given what I believed happened, and I'm going to do it again, in brief.

Before I do that, I want to illustrate that the middle class was never a legitimate socioeconomic standing; it is almost as a believable of a demographic as supply-side economics is a believable school of economic thought. It is a socioeconomic concoction fueled out of total bullshit, first coined in 1745 in James Bradshaw's pamphlet Scheme to prevent running Irish Wools to France, and subjected to more meanings  than most people today would really care to keep up with. These days, the middle class takes on a populist romanticism meaning, which the more and more I hear about it, the more and more foolish I come to realize it really is.

There's really two types of people that participate in today's capitalist economy -- those that can "make it" and those that "cannot". Anything beyond that is by definition of relative personal comfort and convenience: someone that makes $25,000 year may be living comfortably and feel like he or she has it made thanks to a very cheap standard of living; someone that makes $47,000 a year may feel that he or she is living marginally based on factors such as education attained, a personal view on the value of their skill, personal debt, and just really a relative desire for more money.

I know, I know - the whole "middle class" label gives people a certain sense of belonging and purpose; that's more or less why it takes on so much meaning as it does now. Because of the meaning that it takes on, it became legitimately seen as part of social hierarchy; the unfortunate side effect is that because of people not seeing the payoff, as in, "I worked my ass off and now why is all of this happening to me?", we get to be inundated by whining, bitching, and polls by Gallup demonstrating why people are so scared to consume.

I'm sticking by the things I've been pointing out the last few weeks: that labor has become devalued thanks to automation and globalization, that profit superseded volume as the barometer of success, that personal debt is still too high, and this is largely the end game of what happens when a country moves further along as a post-industrial economy. In short, it wasn't a matter of if it was going to happen, but when it was going to happen.

But of course, we're so far off in populist romanticism when that the question gets asked "I've done everything right, and now why is this happening to me?", we'll look for answers anywhere and everywhere, now matter how ludicrous or empty the answers may be. We wait and salivate for the personality that will assuage the middle class that feels sick and tired of being sick and tired, never mind the fact that the modern middle class was just a side effect from the massive pent up consumer demand and cheap energy prices after World War II. We listen for candidates that espouse "middle class values", despite spewing out rhetoric and suggestion policies that really don't do anything to solve the problem.

But what irritates me is that the modern concept of the middle class is a fallacy that only amounts to being an end within itself, yet we refuse to recognize it. Instead of answering the question "Well, what we can do about preserving the middle class", the question that should be asked is what will happen to consumerism when private debt levels stabilize? And beyond that...Will we consume smarter? Will banking systems discourage loose credit? Will we finally find value in human capital once again like before? Will the current barometers of success still stay the same? Are we seeing what could possibly the new reality of the Information Age?

My biggest gripe of all is using the "middle class" jargon as a political tool, continuously allowing one of the biggest socioeconomic fallacies ever bought into to persist. This is not really about the decline of the middle class -- this really needs to be a discussion as to how more people can effectively participate in today's economy.