"Middle Class, but Feeling Economically Insecure"
April 29, 2015
A New York Times columnist opines on what's troubling the middle class:
Middle-class anxiety has been driven by several factors: increasing instability in incomes, a sense among many Americans that they are failing to keep up with the gains of previous generations, and an increasing gap between themselves and the very rich.
I speculate that this misses a key part of the discontent. There's a lot of uncertainty in life, but American parents and their kids a generation or two ago used to feel there was a path offering some certainty. For some kids it was doing well in school, getting into a good college, and then law school or an MBA or banking or work directly on a managerial track. For others it would have been a good high school education following by work in the auto plant or the steel plant, or at a later time, a good construction job or a job with the Postal Service or a civil-service job. How many of those avenues are, today, much shakier or even sharply in decline? There are still opportunities--talk to the iPhone app millionaires or the eBay mavens or biomedical researchers--but they are much different than they were 20 or even 10 years ago.