Why has the Middle Class so declined?

[Heimdal]

A lot of the people described as «middle class» were never actually bourgeois. They were working class people, with a lifestyle sufficiently comfortable to describe themselves as “middle class”.

I think there are a lot of reasons for why this segment of the population have stagnated and/or declined.

Part of the explanation is the decline of low-skilled manufacturing jobs. In the 1950s you could start working at an assembly line after finishing High School. The company was required to pay a so-called family wage. A wage that was high enough so that a single breadwinner (usually the man) could support his spouse staying at home with the kids. Most of these low-skilled manufacturing jobs are gone, and the family wage disappeared many decades ago. The manufacturing jobs that exist today usually require some sort of technical expertise. This problem is compounded by a lack of any sort of industrial policy by the government.

Furthermore the pool of labor has increased, and not just by outsourcing. A man seeking a job in the 1950s didn’t face competition from female workers (it would be a few decades before they fully joined the workforce) or immigrants (as the immigration policy wouldn’t be liberalized until some years later). That means that there are a more people competing for the same jobs.
Another important aspect is the rise in certain costs. People in “middle class” jobs are probably paying less federal taxes than they did three or four decades ago. But they still need health insurance, and they might also wish to save up money for their children’s college tuition. The cost of healthcare and education has increased a lot more than wages. That means that they have less money to spend on other goods and services.

A significant change that has taken place is the creation of a large upper class. There were of course very wealthy people in the decades past, but the differences were less pronounced. People mostly ate the same sort of food, drove the same cars and watched exactly the same television programs. Today people are sorting themselves to a far larger degree. The mass upper class is eating different foods, drive different cars, read different newspapers and watch different television programs. That sets them apart from their poorer neighbors. This creates a sense of a greater inequality.

Then there is the role of family breakdown and substance abuse. The 1960s ushered in a lot of new cultural trends. Some of them were benign, but others were not. The rise in drug abuse and divorce rates probably had a very unfortunate effect on a lot of “middle class” families. The breakdown of the family robbed them of social stability, which is necessary to get a good job and a good education. Drugs also became available to a larger audience during the 1960s and the 1970s, and it probably hit the poor far harder than the wealthy. The latter had the social and economic capital to weather this. Kids in Northeastern prep schools smoked pot and went on to college like their parents, while kids in South Bronx used crack and killed each other in gang wars.