Power and radicalism: Building a middle class in the digital age

If we are interested in shoring up, enlarging and reestablishing a strong middle class, and we very much ought to be, it’s useful to recall how it was we ended up with a strong middle class in the first place. Much of this history is familiar but still worth reflecting on and considering.

 
The Golden Age: What made it?

The Golden Age of the middle class in America and across much of the rich world, was broadly the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. This was an era of rapid, broad-based economic growth. The income distribution was very compressed and there were high levels of intergenerational mobility. It was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but in terms of delivering egalitarian prosperity and opportunity, it was a high watermark in lots of ways.

It’s useful to think about how we got there, because it wasn’t at all an inevitable outcome. It wasn’t something that was baked into the cake when we started to develop the key technologies of the Industrial Revolution. In fact, it took quite a lot of luck, it took quite a lot of work, and it took quite a lot of doing.

Συνέχεια ανάγνωσης εδώ

Πηγή: brookings.edu