[ExI] Middle Class Doomed?

[Kelly Anderson]

On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 8:02 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 07:29:34AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>
> > I believe that incomes almost always follow a power curve, with a few
>
> Depends on the country. It's not a natural law.
>

Can you provide an example of a country where income does not approximately
follow a power curve. Please be specific and have some kind of numbers to
back it up please.


> > people making a lot of money, and a lot of people making a little bit of
> > money. The best one can hope for is that the curve isn't too "corner
> > hugging" and that there is a robust middle class. That seems like pretty
> > simple economics to me.
>
> The only simple thing about economics is that it's an academical
> fairy-tale.
> When many grown men believe into fairy tales, bad things happen.
>

Much of economics is based on intelligent fully informed perfect agents,
which is a fairy tale.

> so why, and whether other forces might be at play beyond technological
> > improvements that make "the rich richer, the poor poorer", which is
> another
> > way of saying that the curve above is too "corner hugging".
>
> There are two major factors mentioned: loss of cheap plentiful energy
> (by adaptive increase in numbers of consumers and also consumption per
> individual), and soon scarcity in other material supply, and globalization.
> Loss of special snowflake status is hard to take. No doubt there are
> several other factors I'm missing.
>

I haven't noticed that energy prices are skyrocketing. They are going up,
but it doesn't seem like they are going up as fast as say the cost of a
college education, or the cost of health insurance.

Scarcity is something that mostly exists in theory, not yet in practice.

I do thing globalization is killing the middle class. No doubt about that.

Special snowflake status could be applied to the entire United States. It's
part of the Copernican revolution that the US is not the center of the
universe. So I can't disagree with that at all.

-Kelly
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