“My observation is every technological/economic/societal change has hurt the middle class”
So back to the days when we were serfs working on the nobleman’s lands for a pittance! Technological improvement is the only reason we have a middle class.
Poor writing on my part. I was thinking of say changes starting during the 1960s.
Your missing the point. I grew up in a factory town. My dad, uncle and a lot of my friends dads worked in one of the numerous plants making a decent middle class wage. Most of those plants ran 3 shifts per day with upwards of 200 people per shift. Now that same work is being done in one shift by maybe a hundred or so employees and their robot friends. Those guys who worked in those jobs bought houses and cars and TVs and refrigerators all built by other guys working in other factories. They also bought meat from local meat markets and hired plumbers and electricians who bought the cars and appliances factory workers built. It was very intertwined economy and it worked. Then they started sending those jobs off shore replacing them with ‘service’ industry jobs which didn’t pay anywhere near as much. And that is when the middle class started its death spiral. You can’t remove integral parts of a complex interdependent economy and expect the economy to continue to flourish. Those factory jobs were the way up for a lot of poor less educated people. Are companies making bigger profits today sure, but the money is not making into the hands of a large segment of the population in the form of wages as it used to. I personally don’t believe you can turn back the clock on this. Progress is what it is, but it hasn’t been progress for a large segment of the working class population of the country.