Don’t let me hear you say life’s taking you nowhere

I want to talk about a complicated subject here, which is changes in the actual status of the American middle class in economic and psychological terms. A big reason why this subject is so complicated is precisely that these two things are not at all the same, or even directly comparable, although obviously they’re related.

A dominant trope in American political rhetoric today is the idea that the nation and in particular the middle class has suffered a sharp decline from a previous relative golden age. This is of course an absolutely central idea to fascist thought, in fact probably the single most important idea, but it’s very widely held among people who are not only not fascist, but sincerely and intensely anti-fascists, i.e., leftists.

Now the question that interests me in particular at this moment is, why? Why is this idea so widely held, both among the MAGA base and among people who would describe themselves as despising everything MAGA stands for, other than I suppose this particular idea.

The middle class is notoriously hard to define, especially in a country like the US where its the class that everybody outside the plutocracy and the genuinely poor define themselves as belonging to, and as a consequence is constantly valorized by politicians of all persuasions. (I almost literally can’t remember the last time I heard a national politician even use the word “poor.”)

But let’s use a common definition, which is families in the middle half of the income distribution. I’m going to use family income here, meaning people living together related by blood or marriage, rather than household income, which includes single-person households and unrelated people living together. I’m using this because when people all across the political spectrum talk about the middle class, they tend to focus understandably on middle class families, given that middle class families are thought of as the beau ideal of the American Dream ™.

Numbers

Family income at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles, 1965 and 2023, CPI inflation-adjusted.

1965

25th: 32K

50th: 54K

75th: 79K

2023

25th: 55K

50th: 102K

75th: 176K

So the 25th percentile of family income today would have been the median in the mid-1960s, the median has nearly doubled, and the 75th percentile has more than doubled.

These numbers really don’t line up with the whole “back in the day you could enjoy a solid middle class life on one (male) income” discourse very well at all, especially given that the labor force participation rate has gone from 59% in the mid-1960s to 62.6% currently.

Now as always things are complicated. For one thing houses are vastly more expensive today than they were in 1965. Specifically, the median price of a single family house has gone from $205K to $415K. (The mean gap is even higher, as interestingly mean home prices were barely higher 60 years ago than the median — $205K v. 220K — while today the mean price is about $530K rather than $415K).

But one reason houses are so much expensive is that middle class people are so much wealthier, because family income has more or less doubled, so people can afford to finance vastly more expensive houses. Again, it’s complicated. I live in a town where the real dollar median price for single family houses has gone from $275K to $1.2 million over the past 35 years. That’s obviously a huge problem for middle class people, who can’t afford to buy a typical house in this town. So it’s not as if the price of housing isn’t a problem for the middle class: it is, especially regionally (I will note that the places where housing is most expensive tend to vote for Democrats, and it’s not because you can win elections by relying on the votes of people who live in two million dollar houses).

But rates of homeownership are marginally higher today than they were in the mid-60s, despite all this: 63% v. 65%.

The cost of medical care is enormously higher today than it was 60 years ago, because we have a supremely fucked up health care system in terms of both justice and efficiency, but still, in 1965, on the eve of the creation of Medicare, half of American seniors had no health insurance of any kind. If you’re in the middle class, you generally pay insanely high prices for medical care, although this is to a significant extent hidden by the fact that most people have no idea how much of their income goes toward paying for health insurance, since the employer contribution to their health insurance is pretty much a straight pass through. But way more people are insured now than they were 60 years ago, and the quality of medical care is vastly better, because medical science has improved by leaps and bounds over the past six decades, despite the RFK Jr fantasy world in which everybody was so healthy before processed foods, wi-fi, and chemtrails were invented by rootless cosmopolitan financiers.

Higher education is vastly more expensive as well, as well as vastly more prevalent. The percentage of adults with a four-year degree or more has gone from about 9% in the mid-60s to about 38% today. The cost of higher education in this country is a scandal, especially given how much more critical higher ed is for economic mobility and stability than it was a couple of generations ago, and it plays a key role in creating a pervasive sense of middle class precarity.

Now the classic response to all this from the back in the day one job solid middle class life people is that economic status is so much more precarious today than it was in the golden years, especially given the shredding of the social safety net. The problem with this argument is that it really isn’t true, or at least it tends to be highly exaggerated. Most middle class people 60 years ago were at-will employees, just as they are today. Companies were somewhat less ruthless about downsizing, private equity didn’t really exist, etc. so again, it’s complicated, but the notion that you more or less had a stable job for life back in they day is still wildly exaggerated. It’s the politics of nostalgia, not economic reality. As for the shredding of the social safety net, America has never had a good social safety net compared to countries in the developed world, because it’s well known in this country that socialism makes the baby Jesus cry, and it certainly wasn’t BETTER 60 years ago than it is today (no Medicare, Social Security payments were much smaller in real terms, etc.).

So why do people feel that things were so much better for the middle class back then than they are today? This is where we get to psychological factors, which in my view account for basically all of this feeling. These include:

The culture of materialism and conspicuous consumption is much more intense today than it was 60 years ago, even though — see Galbraith et al. — it was certainly a thing back in the day as well. Today you have a shameless in every sense plutocracy, reality TV, TikTok, and so forth. Grotesque materialism and obscene wealth disparities are in your face 24/7. This makes people feel terrible, insecure, and poor.

Standards of living have skyrocketed. What’s considered an acceptable house, for example, is radically different than what was acceptable 60 years ago. I grew up in a seven and then eight person household in a 1,900 square foot tract house, and my father was a medical school professor. A household in which every adult doesn’t have their own car is considered sub-middle class unless you live in Manhattan or the like. This very much was not the case 60 years ago. 91% of American adults have smart phones.

60 years ago nobody in the middle class ate at sit-down restaurants, except for relatively special occasions. Today plenty of middle class people do that five times a week. And so on and so forth.

Expectations in terms of standards of living are vastly higher, as they should be, because the country is vastly wealthier.

But the discourse about how much less expensive and more stable life was back in the day is 93.2% bullshit, and more important it’s basically reactionary trending toward fascist bullshit, which is one reason to be very cautious about buying into it. People feel terrible because we have a fucked up culture that specializes in making them feel terrible. It’s not because Daddy had a high paying job from which he couldn’t be fired in the long ago and far away when it was so much better than it is today.

. . . Something several people have noted in comments which is clearly a big factor that I didn’t mention is that extreme poverty/homelessness/severe personal dysfunction is way more visible now than it used to be for all sorts of reasons.. This could be called The guy screaming about space aliens in the Whole Food parking lot effect, which creates a strong there but for the grace of management go I sensation.