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What killed the middle class?

See brad when you actually make a substantive point you get substantive replies.
 
I pay an absurd amount of my annual income into taxes. I think I'm probably middle class, but toward the lower end of middle instead of the upper. Year after year, the amount of income, sales, and property taxes that I pay are standout numbers when I'm budgeting for the next fiscal year.

Who the fuck budgets for sales taxes?
 
How McKinsey destroyed the middle class


In the middle of the last century, management saturated American corporations. Every worker, from the CEO down to production personnel, served partly as a manager, participating in planning and coordination along an unbroken continuum in which each job closely resembled its nearest neighbor. Elaborately layered middle managers—or “organization men”—coordinated production among long-term employees. In turn, companies taught workers the skills they needed to rise up the ranks. At IBM, for example, a 40-year worker might spend more than four years, or 10 percent, of his work life in fully paid, IBM-provided training.

Mid-century labor unions (which represented a third of the private-sector workforce), organized the lower rungs of a company’s hierarchy into an additional control center—as part of what the United States Supreme Court, writing in 1960, called “industrial self-government”—and in this way also contributed to the management function. Even production workers became, on account of lifetime employment and workplace training, functionally the lowest-level managers. They were charged with planning and coordinating the development of their own skills to serve the long-run interests of their employers.

...

As the business journalist Walter Kiechel put it in his book Lords of Strategy, consultants openly sought to “foment a stratification within companies and society” by concentrating the management function in elite executives, aided (of course) by advisers from consultants’ own ranks. Management-consulting firms deployed a panoply of branded processes against middle management. Another account of the industry, The Witch Doctors, explains that the Computer Sciences Corporation’s consulting arm, working with the Sloan School of Management at MIT, developed corporate “reengineering” to “break an organization down into its components parts,” eliminate the redundant ones, namely middle managers, and then put the remaining parts “together again to create a new machine.” GTE, Apple, and Pacific Bell would all cite reengineering as responsible for their downsizing. McKinsey framed its path to downsizing, which the firm called “overhead value analysis,” as an answer to the mid-century corporation’s excessive reliance on middle management. As McKinsey’s John Neuman admitted in an essay introducing the method, the “process, though swift, is not painless. Since overhead expenses are typically 70% to 85% people-related and most savings come from work-force reductions, cutting overhead does demand some wrenching decisions.”

Management consultants thus implemented and rationalized a transformation in the American corporation. Companies that had long affirmed express “no layoff” policies now took aim at what the corporate raider Carl Icahn, writing in the The New York Times in the late 1980s, called “corporate bureaucracies” run by “incompetent” and “inbred” middle managers. They downsized in response not to particular business problems but rather to a new managerial ethos and methods; they downsized when profitable as well as when struggling, and during booms as well as busts. The downsizing peaked during the extraordinary economic boom of the 1990s. The culls, moreover, were dramatic. AT&T, for example, once aimed to cut the ratio of managers to nonmanagers in one of its units from 1:5 to 1:30. Overall, middle managers were downsized at nearly twice the rate of nonmanagerial workers. Downsizing was indeed wrenching. When IBM abandoned lifetime employment in the 1990s, local officials asked gun-shop owners around its headquarters to close their stores while employees absorbed the shock.
 
I pay an absurd amount of my annual income into taxes. I think I'm probably middle class, but toward the lower end of middle instead of the upper. Year after year, the amount of income, sales, and property taxes that I pay are standout numbers when I'm budgeting for the next fiscal year.

absurd = 20%
 
I’d be shocked if more than a few people here were middle class much less lower middle class. The 25th to 75th percentile of household income is $32-115K.
 
Props to texasdeac for bumping this thread but now I'm on pins and needles to learn more about Wake&Bake's experience as a small business owner.

The Jan '20 jobs report substantially outperformed projections:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/07/us-nonfarm-payrolls-january-2019.html

KEY POINTS

Nonfarm payrolls surged 225,000 for the month, well above Wall Street estimates for a 158,000 gain.

The unemployment rate ticked higher to 3.6%, but for the right reason as the labor force participation rate increased 0.2 percentage points to 63.4%, matching its highest level since June 2013.

Average hourly earnings rose 3.1% over a year ago to $28.44, ahead of estimates for 3% growth.
 
I pay an absurd amount of my annual income into taxes. I think I'm probably middle class, but toward the lower end of middle instead of the upper. Year after year, the amount of income, sales, and property taxes that I pay are standout numbers when I'm budgeting for the next fiscal year.

You budget for sales tax?
 
Speaking of the Atlantic, this David Brooks piece is actually good. I literally scrolled up in the middle of reading it to make sure it was actually him.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.
 
Speaking of the Atlantic, this David Brooks piece is actually good. I literally scrolled up in the middle of reading it to make sure it was actually him.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/


Combined with our unwillingness or inability to form a mechanism (of any kind) for an available/functional long-term care system and, viola, we have horrendous ways of attempting to care for our frail/sick but not imminently dying people.
 
Speaking of the Atlantic, this David Brooks piece is actually good. I literally scrolled up in the middle of reading it to make sure it was actually him.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/

I thought this section of the article was also well put and true:

As the social structures that support the family have decayed, the debate about it has taken on a mythical quality. Social conservatives insist that we can bring the nuclear family back. But the conditions that made for stable nuclear families in the 1950s are never returning. Conservatives have nothing to say to the kid whose dad has split, whose mom has had three other kids with different dads; “go live in a nuclear family” is really not relevant advice. If only a minority of households are traditional nuclear families, that means the majority are something else: single parents, never-married parents, blended families, grandparent-headed families, serial partnerships, and so on. Conservative ideas have not caught up with this reality.

Progressives, meanwhile, still talk like self-expressive individualists of the 1970s: People should have the freedom to pick whatever family form works for them. And, of course, they should. But many of the new family forms do not work well for most people—and while progressive elites say that all family structures are fine, their own behavior suggests that they believe otherwise. As the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has pointed out, highly educated progressives may talk a tolerant game on family structure when speaking about society at large, but they have extremely strict expectations for their own families. When Wilcox asked his University of Virginia students if they thought having a child out of wedlock was wrong, 62 percent said it was not wrong. When he asked the students how their own parents would feel if they themselves had a child out of wedlock, 97 percent said their parents would “freak out.” In a recent survey by the Institute for Family Studies, college-educated Californians ages 18 to 50 were less likely than those who hadn’t graduated from college to say that having a baby out of wedlock is wrong. But they were more likely to say that personally they did not approve of having a baby out of wedlock.

In other words, while social conservatives have a philosophy of family life they can’t operationalize, because it no longer is relevant, progressives have no philosophy of family life at all, because they don’t want to seem judgmental. The sexual revolution has come and gone, and it’s left us with no governing norms of family life, no guiding values, no articulated ideals. On this most central issue, our shared culture often has nothing relevant to say—and so for decades things have been falling apart.
 
I thought this section of the article was also well put and true:

True in so many ways. People tend to have one opinion/belief when the finger is pointed outward towards others, and another set of opinions/beliefs when the finger is pointed inward towards themselves.
 
Eh. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say the people who wants to make sure people are free to have an abortion also aren’t keen on having children out of wedlock.

Both sides greatly prefer two or more parent households. They just have different strategies for getting there.
 
Eh. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say the people who wants to make sure people are free to have an abortion also aren’t keen on having children out of wedlock.

Both sides greatly prefer two or more parent households. They just have different strategies for getting there.

Brooks' point, which I think is pretty valid, is that neither has a really coherent philosophy of the family that actually works in today's world, and neither has much of a workable strategy either. The conservative strategy is scolding, shaming, and starving if possible, and the liberal strategy is - what exactly? There's a lot of different ideas that kind of nibble at the corners of the issue (lower incarceration levels, public healthcare and college to reduce financial stress and maybe therefore help family stability) but none of that is enough to really move the needle.

I don't really think Brooks' proposed solution of artificial families really moves the needle either, but I do think there is some merit in his diagnoses.
 
I think Brooks hints at something that's pretty important. That is the economic forces that drive "family" and community bonding and/or interdependence. It's terrifying (he says) to consider but there appears to be a significant correlation (and I think likely causation) between the wealth of a society and familial/social cohesion. As able, we tend to purchase our freedom, privacy, and...isolation. IOW, there are significant economic and psychological factors that indeed drive the sociological manifestations (or data, which are more easily observed/calculated). It's not just about adopting whatever philosophy or sociological theory we prefer.


We definitely had this impression years ago as we toured around recently opened up (former) East Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall (etc.) and compared the culture/people there to those in the west.
 
Brooks' point, which I think is pretty valid, is that neither has a really coherent philosophy of the family that actually works in today's world, and neither has much of a workable strategy either. The conservative strategy is scolding, shaming, and starving if possible, and the liberal strategy is - what exactly? There's a lot of different ideas that kind of nibble at the corners of the issue (lower incarceration levels, public healthcare and college to reduce financial stress and maybe therefore help family stability) but none of that is enough to really move the needle.

I don't really think Brooks' proposed solution of artificial families really moves the needle either, but I do think there is some merit in his diagnoses.

The liberal strategy is to get rid of obstacles to family formation like low wages, lack of affordable health care, lack of job security, lack of reproductive rights and choice as to when and how to form a family, college debt, bans on gay adoption, housing discrimination, workplace discrimination, etc.

The conservative punitive strategy has been successful and resilient. The big liberal wins have been ACA and legalizing gay marriage.
 
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