
The Middle Class Is Being Wiped Out Of Existence In America - nir
http://www.businessinsider.com/22-statistics-that-prove-the-middle-class-is-being-systematically-wiped-out-of-existence-in-america-2010-7
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nir
(I submitted this) - don't agree with all their stats and the article could be
better, but thought it would be interesting to hear HN community's views on
the issue.

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anigbrowl
The text is hysterical bullshit, and a lot of the examples are cherry-picked,
or don't show what they purport to (eg the first graph about the concentration
of wealth suggests stock holdings have diluted rather than concentrated over
time.

But yes, our economy has some serious problems, and inequality is one of them.
Not because I believe in socialism, but because above a certain level we waste
a lot of money on guarding the current distribution of wealth, and that has a
considerable opportunity cost. See this small but rather influential economics
article:
[http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/Glenn_Loury/louryhomepage/teac...](http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/Glenn_Loury/louryhomepage/teaching/Ec%20222/Garrison%20America.pdf)

My personal hunch is that free economies are never destined for pure equality,
but if they drift too far from a Pareto distribution the fiscal disparities
will result in sharply increased political polarization. statisticians of the
future are going to have a whale of a time with the combination of the census,
an unusually severe recession, election data and a massive lexical analysis
dataset.

~~~
nir
I definitely don't believe in Socialism, having personally witnessed its
failures, but I've begun to think the free market beliefs I hold don't always
benefit most people either.

Seems like the majority of people are more suited for holding a job rather
than building a company, by optimizing for entrepreneurship we're benefiting a
very small part of society, and as we lose the promise of belonging to a
strong, stable middle class with certain amount of effort we're creating a
serious risk for democracy. I think we're already seeing political fringe
movements creeping into the mainstream as result.

~~~
ams6110
But optimizing for entrepreneurship and building companies results in a lot
more opportunity for those who just want a job, right?

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Vyk
This directly contradicts Henry Ford's opinion in this recently submitted
article <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494361>

Without disposable time and income people won't be able to buy the products
which create the wealth of the upper class. If the middle class disappears,
the upper class will disappear as well.

