this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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Complacent middle class, or rapidly shrinking and struggling to not fall further middle class?
Yeah, the issue here isn't the middle class, it's as usual, the owner class that's the problem
The middle class is their tool. They are incented to perpetuate this bullshit.
The middle class is like the personal carbon footprint - it's a fabrication created by the ultra-wealthy to divert responsibility from themselves. There is only the owner class and the working class.
Except the middle class actually does own most stuff, and consumes the most. The ultra-rich are rich, but there's just so few of them.
In Pikettys Capital in the 21st Century the breakdown for US wealth distribution was something like: top 1% has ~30%, top 10% has ~50% (that includes the 1%), the next top 40% have almost all the rest so like ~49%, and the bottom 50% of the economic ladder has that 1%. That was a decade ago, and its gotten worse since then
Here's the fed's up-to-date numbers. So yeah, that's a decent summary.
Doesn't it show exactly what I said? Lemmy has a whole lot of top 10% people - I wouldn't be shocked if it's the majority. Nobody here is thinking of them when they say "ruling class". The top 1% also contains a lot of kinda-rich people, who maybe own a couple of car dealerships, but could never afford a jet. If they do something in IT instead of cars, they again might be on Lemmy.
The total is about 170 trillion. For reference, Forbes billionaires, including the non-American ones, add up to 16.1 trillion.
Agreed - the data does show that the middle 40% own ~50%, and that since this bloc consists of more people they therefore have more consumption (probably...maybe? that seems like something that might need more research to quantify, and probably has easily skewable results in either direction). These facts should not absolve the wealthiest of their detrimental hoarding, but us living in the 'core' are the 1% of the world so yea I also agree that it does not absolve us of our extreme consumption relative to most people of the world. I am reminded of a comic(or a tweet or something) where some guy is complaining about the traffic and someone else responds with 'brother YOU are the traffic'.
The income distribution would get you closer. The typical way to measure it would be amount earned minus amount saved, right?
Besides being fewer, richer people are able to save a bigger percentage of their earnings. That puts the middle class in kind of a consumption sweet spot - which is why the big businesses mostly target them.
If you want to measure less tangible things like carbon emissions or social opportunities it gets much more complicated, although I have no reason to think the overall story would change.
I should point out the international picture is nuanced in a similar way. There's middle income countries, there's very rich people in poor countries, and there's countries like Dubai that kind of defy categorisation. The basic picture that the West is rich holds, but not that it's all the wealth, and developing economies are quickly catching up because it's just easier for them to grow. (Developed countries also account for a bit more than 10% of world population)
I respectfully disagree. The middle class is not perfect, but the issue here is the ruling class
How are you (OP) blaming the "middle" class? What could you suggest nurses, teachers, fire fighters, etc do to solve the problem of wealth inequality?
I genuinely want to know because it seems to me that we control nothing and have no excess to give.
Stop performing those services. En mass.
...so let people die, stop caring for our neighbours, allow ignorance and illiteracy to fester. Seems extreme and misplaced.
A better, less-nihilistic approach might be: stop buying things, cancel subscriptions, sell dividend-paying stocks, etc. Or even better: a general strike.
A general strike is stopping doing those services en masse.
Yes, but it includes the whole population rather than a narrow sub-section. It would also send a much stronger message.
See what happens when CEOs and politicians need to wipe their own asses.
Wait, what difference does it make whether the stocks pay dividends or not?
I suppose there isn't much.
Dividends are free cash that the company distributes to shareholders whereas it ought to reward the workers imo. I see it as peak siphoning profit away from the working class to the "ruling" class (who don't contribute anything).
Capital gains and the whole stock market are bad too. As is our tired, biased tax code.
Jesus... a lot to fix.
Who suffers the most? The vulnerable
You get that they'll just de-professionalize those roles and let untrained, unskilled hacks and quacks loose on the general populace, right? I mean you want to have your kids taught by some goof quoting Grok, and your grandma getting her life saving treatment from Bobby Kennedy approved witch-doctors that's where you end up if the professionals all decide to quit En Masse.
Lol, too true 😁
What's going on in schools isn't much better.
Do you mean "incentivized?" But yeah.
Incent is correct in fact 🤓
incent verb in·cent in-ˈsent incented; incenting; incents transitive verb
: incentivize … a large prize … may also incent some employee referrals. —Bill Conerly
Its definition is literally a reference to "incentivize," so all that proves is that language has rotted slightly
Back in the 1840s apparently.
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/incent_v?tl=true
Not if you actually read the chart
"The earliest known use of the verb incent is in the 1840s."
???
If you read the chart, rather than just the AI summary, you'd see that usage was quite low until a slow rise in the mid-20th century.
I read the whole document akshully. No need to be so cranky.
Sure, Jan.
In the US, actually-doing-better-and-better middle class, for the most part. I'm seeing the top 10% as a usual "center" in analysis of the k-shaped economy. It's brown people and Trump voters in trailer parks that are actually losing.
Looks like the trend is just a lot less pronounced in Canada, though. We're all a bit poorer.
It's hard to be sad about that - their choices did this to themselves(and, annoyingly, also to the rest of us)
Yep. Not being fascist was an option. In theory, anyway. In practice that stuff always has an audience everywhere.
Land hoarding is the problem.