What happened to the middle class, blue collar man?

[Torie]

Prole drift, a term the inimitable Paul Fussel coined. The thing is, so many of those higher skilled blue collar, and lower middle class jobs, got "commodityized" as it were. Damn those computers and scanners and all. Now a zombie can be a supermarket clerk.

Find those jobs with a high barrier to entry baby, be it skill, talent, or all too often these days, government regulation, where you are one of the lucky ones to slip through the door, with the right connections and all.

[Torie]

Ah, yeah, Fussell. I remember reading The Great War and Modern Memory for the first time and being very impressed (and also repeatedly amused). Read it again not so long ago and while it's got it's flaws, that hardly matters. Really innovative.

The humor value in his Class book makes it a grand read, even if everything he says is otherwise BS. Trust me.

You want to know what he uses as an inditia of a place with a low brow, benighted, and otherwise embarrassment to Western Civilization culture? You know, Naso's kind of hood? 

[Torie]

You want to know what he uses as an inditia of a place with a low brow, benighted, and otherwise embarrassment to Western Civilization culture?

Of course. I'd guess something like satellite dishes, but it's probably something more random.

The per capita incidence of bowling alleys. Dishes came later. Paducah, KY, and Dubuque, Iowa, I think were near the top.

[Torie]

Sure an internationalized labor market, and mass immigration, much of it low skill and illegal, has had an impact, no doubt about it. Sorry I didn't list everything in one post!

Economic autarky however has been tried before. It failed.