Wednesday, December 04, 2013

This is What It Means to be Lower-Middle-Class in Today's America. Turning of the Screw.



The rich and powerful have coined a name for them.   They're called the Precariat.   These are blue and white collar workers who work full time for meagre wages that leave them in a state of constant precarious economic vulnerability.  They're dependent on their next paycheque.  It's all that keeps them from plunging, along with their family, into poverty.  Noam Chomsky wrote about this growing class and their plight in Huffington Post.

The venerable, Brookings Institution, no hotbed of pinko radicalism, has just published an essay entitled, "A Dozen Facts About America's Struggling Lower-Middle-Class.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-dd6T3HP_Q

Joe the Lion said...

I know very little about how these things work and this is probably very naive, but as a member of the Precariat I have to ask how the "1%" expect to maintain and increase their wealth if the people they depend on to keep the economy thriving cannot afford to purchase the goods and services that are the foundation of the economy?

The Mound of Sound said...

Actually, Joe, the point you make is quite true. The 1% are taking a very short-term but extremely lucrative gain and they don't worry about the long term. Jared Diamond, in his book "Collapse", discusses this as a form of short-term rational thinking.