The coming collapse of the middle class

Hi Dmitry,

Don’t forget that the middle class was an invention of the Capitalism to show that was better than the Communism. The communist politicians promised the paradise to the people who were suffering those totalitarian regimes. The very intelligent response, that was given by the first world (especially in Europe), to the threat of the Communism was the welfare state, in USA, maybe was the cars of 3 liters for everyone . Unfortunately, in our days, the middle class is not longer necessary. Because of this, the middle class will be eliminated by its creator, namely, the Capitalism.

Interesting. I thought that the separation of the societies into classes was an invention of Marx, Lenin, and similar criminals.

There has never been any strict separation of the people into classes and the boundaries between them was always artificially invented by people like the communists to grow hatred between various people – hatred that they found convenient for their purposes because it allowed them to become the leaders of the “class struggle”.

Every politician who has ever thought about the society as being composed out of “classes” and who thought that this meme was important was thinking as a Marxist.

In real, functioning capitalism, the concepts were always ill-defined, which is why the “collapse of a class” is ill-defined, too. All comments of this sort are merely linguistic games driven by an agenda – usually an agenda similar to the original Marx agenda.

Hi guys,

one could call her socialist, I guess. So what? Putting a label on her does not mean she talks absolute crap. Obama’s administration actually seems to be more sensitive to arguments like hers compared to previous administration – if so, it probably means that they were really unable to find a solution just within internal bounds of “capitalism”. doesn’t it? As it seems anyway, socialist societies of scandinavian type proved to be more stable w.r.t. surprises of crisis.

Lubos – regarding classes, the world is not scale invariant While your income increases, your quality of life does not scale linearly with income. So different scales mean different physics

Dear Dmitry, “talking absolute crap about politics” is the very definition of a socialist. That explains why your first three sentences are logically inconsistent.

Scandinavia could have survived with some quasi-socialism (it is still driven by the capitalists – they’re just heavily taxed!) because they’re a rather talented race.

Still, it is complete nonsense that such systems avoid crises. They grow many more, see e.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E....._the_1990s

Finally, I didn’t say that things in life don’t depend on income or that any income is qualitatively identical. I wrote that one can’t divide people into “classes” or even talk about the disappearance of the class.

This is, by the way, completely true in your physics analogy, too. Scale is always a continuous quantity, not a discrete one, so one can’t ever exactly divide them into boxes – and a “middle scale” cannot ever disappear. It’s always there. Different phenomena occur in different intervals of scales but even if there are no phenomena whose typical scale is almost exactly equal to X – e.g. in the middle – it doesn’t mean that X has disappeared from physics.

Lubos,

The only difference between developed countries and developing countries, is the middle class. How do you think is measured the country’s wealth? The middle class is what brings more to the gross domestic product. Fortunately, the middle class is not only being replacing by the poor people, that don’t have money at all. This class is being replaced by people who earn enough money to live, although they have to rent a room, because the rent of the entire flat is too expensive. These people don’t have car, don’t have children, do not save, shared the rent of the flat, and so … . Here in Spain, this new class earns about 1000 ? /month. Your thoughts show, that you’re a privileged one, a very talented man, that maybe see to the rest from above. Your aptitude is legitimate, and your ideas are legitimate, too. But please, the ordinary people have the right to think in another way, otherwise the world would be very boring.

Dmitry,

The mixed economies, like the economies of the Scandinavian countries, are the best economic systems ever conceived, much better that the system set up by Reagan and Thatcher, which has caused the current economic crisis. Maybe, for the rest of the capitalist countries, are needed a ‘New Perestroika’, and maybe Obama will be the new Gorbachev.

Dear Dmitry, once again, your analogy with the KK monopoles is correct, but your conclusion is wrong in both cases. It is my terminology that is right and yours that is wrong.

A Kaluza-Klein U(1) magnetically charged object is a KK monopole, and not a KK instanton, and a person talking complete crap about politics is called a socialist, and not a capitalist or a middle class or whatever was your suggestion.

What I am saying is not that your ad hoc scenario is impossible, but that it has no meaningful physics in it. The first lethal mistake in your reasoning appears in the first three words, “let us divide”. The crappy value of the rest of your reasoning follows. You simply can’t build any valuable idea out of a mental excrement.

The actual society is not divided in this way, so whatever you deduce by dividing it in this way will be inconsequential or even nonsensical.

Dear Alberto, the difference between developed and developing countries is not a class but the magnitude of the average GDP per capita – a difference that has further reasons, namely different traditions, different aptitudes, different degrees of freedom, enforcability of law, respect for private property, motivation of the bulk of people to work, and other things.

Poverty or relative poverty, regardless of your favorite interpretation of this relative poverty in terms of unphysical “classes”, is statistically a consequence of these primary reasons, and not their reason.

Finally, you might care not about the average GDP per capita of a nation but about the average GDP per capita of a selected “class”. This is, first of all, unfair. Second of all, it is counterproductive because the free society has the best mechanisms to concentrate the assets so that it makes a maximum progress for the society as a whole.

Supporting a preferred class by stealing the resources from others is always a form of state-driven violence and every form of such state-driven violence leads to a hugely negative blow to the economy. The form of state-driven violence that wants the average people to own everything or almost everything, and to screw others in order to achieve this disgusting goal, is called communism, whether or not the preferred class is called the “working class” or the “middle class”.

In the classical communism, this “middle class” was actually called “working class” but the logic was identical. The communists have only modified their terminology, trying to separate themselves from the failed and criminal system, but because they haven’t really changed their idea, they remain as dangerous as they were during Lenin’s and Stalin’s times.

People have as many children as they find appropriate, and I am scared by a society where a bureaucrat feels obliged to dictate other people whether they should have a sexual intercourse and how many children they should get.

Of course that economic considerations influence decisions about the children-making by rational people. How could they not? What’s your point? Of course that societies want to be rich, and if they’re rich, they can have as many children as possible. But the way to be rich is to have a working successful market economy.

On the other hand, there are also societies that have many more children than they can feed and make happy – because the parents are irrational or irresponsible. What do any of these things have to do with the concept of a “middle class”? All these links that you try to create in between the lines are completely dysfunctional.

I am not saying that societies are strictly separated to communist/fascist societies and the free ones. Quite on the contrary, and I have argued quite a lot in many particular cases that real societies are always somewhere in between (and Russia is an example I have repeatedly defended in precisely this way, by the way).

But what I am sure is that the motion of a society – or even our society or my nation – from freedom towards communism, socialism, or fascism is always a bad dynamics, regardless of the immediate absolute position of the society on the communism vs freedom axis.

Oh, and why I am sure that I am no longer living in a communist country but a free one?

Because I/we freely buy and sell whatever I/we want, travel anywhere, convert currencies, start and stop businesses, pay a reasonably low fraction of the profit as taxes, say whatever I/we want without being arrested.

When a politician starts to produce lots of socialist or communist garbage in our capital city, he is hit by hundreds of eggs into his fucking socialist face.

You may be confused by the difference between communism and capitalism, comrade, but I am surely not. As you correctly noticed, I view this dichotomy very intensely, and although the parameter distinguishing these two idealized situations is continuous, it has changed dramatically in my country during the last 20 years, much more than all the parameters counting your “middle class” have changed in centuries.

Dear Lubos,

People have as many children as they find appropriate, and I am scared by a society where a bureaucrat feels obliged to dictate other people whether they should have a sexual intercourse and how many children they should get.

I see, when somebody is dropping a word “socialism” (or “capitalism” ) into the conversation, you become as wet as a feminist nurse you like to discuss so much on TRF. It looks even funnier taking into account that usually a person who drops the word “socialism” into conversation is you Hmm, aren’t we dealing then with a genuine example of psychological masturbation? If so, I would recommend you to immediately find a partner to enter into a genuine sexual intercourse. Sorry it is me recommending and not Czech bureaucrats – Czechia is a free country. And I cannot be the one, sorry (I see, I am married and have a child).

Of course that economic considerations influence decisions about the children-making by rational people. How could they not? What?s your point?

Well, true, I did not formulate yet my point, what I am doing is defending the point of Elizabeth Warren for the sake of fun. Her point is that during last 30 years people from the middle class in US (:-)) lost their possibility to support more than 1 child in families. Regarding Spain, Alberto expressed above a similar point of view, and I don’t quite see how you were able to miss it.

But what I am sure is that the motion of a society – or even our society or my nation – from freedom towards communism, socialism, or fascism is always a bad dynamics, regardless of the immediate absolute position of the society on the communism vs freedom axis

Well, what about oligarchy, is motion from democracy to oligarchy good or bad from your point of view?

Because I/we freely buy and sell whatever I/we want, travel anywhere, convert currencies, start and stop businesses, pay a reasonably low fraction of the profit as taxes, say whatever I/we want without being arrested.

Ok, that’s probably good enough. Following this logic, can US of 1960s be considered a free country?

When a politician starts to produce lots of socialist or communist garbage in our capital city, he is hit by hundreds of eggs into his fucking socialist face

You are so horny However, recalling that I am married (see above), you might have correctly concluded that this kind of lust does not really excite me.

As you correctly noticed, I view this dichotomy very intensely, and although the parameter distinguishing these two idealized situations is continuous, it has changed dramatically in my country during the last 20 years, much more than all the parameters counting your “middle class” have changed in centuries

Actually, I believe, comrade, all these socialism/free state rants do not have much to do with the problem we are talking about. One can see it for example noticing that general chanting about dangers of socialism and fascism will not help much preventing the collapse of the middle class in US (as it will not save GM from bankruptcy)

Cheers,
Dmitry.

P.S. I got so excited that forgot to answer a question of mine – what is the natural criterion for dividing society into classes if not income? Brain? Smart/stupid? Entrepreneurial/lazy?