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The “working class struggle” is a myth

Vivek Ramaswamy and Mickey Kaus on the "working class struggle":

These two disagree about the causes, but they simply assume that the working class is, indeed, struggling. But it's not true. The past couple of decades haven't been great for anyone, but working class men—which is who everyone is really talking about when they say "working class"—have seen roughly average wage growth:

These earnings are the median of the second quartile, which is right around the 40th percentile. Combine this with a high school education and it's about the purest definition of working class you're going to find.

And what we find is that working class men have done a couple of points better than those with some community college and a couple of points worse than college grads. Over 20 years. The difference is negligible.

But is this because working class men have simply given up and dropped out of the labor force? No:

High school grads have always worked at lower rates than those with more education, but over the past 20 years their participation rate has declined 7.4%. That's better than community college grads and just a hair worse than college grads.

There's more to life than money, and the working class may be suffering in ways that are less obvious: obesity, drugs, discontent over their jobs, etc. Go ahead and make a case if you want to. But on the usual metric of financial comfort, they're (slightly) better off than they were 20 years ago and doing about as well as anyone else. They aren't the victims of any special struggle.

POSTSCRIPT: If you're interested, there has been an era when working class men struggled. It's just not recent and not the one most people think of:

That's "morning in America" in the red box. Working class men were devastated by the Reagan/Bush administrations and made no gains under the Bush Jr. administration. They did well under Clinton and then, following the Great Recession, under Obama, Trump, and Biden. Trump is literally the only Republican president of the past half century who has been good for the working class.

48 thoughts on “The “working class struggle” is a myth

  1. golack

    But the baseline has shifted....

    Everyone needs high speed internet, a big screen TV (in every room), streaming(or cable) service, cell phone, etc.

    Did I mention a car?

  2. Citizen99

    Yet another example of how the mainstream media, so fixated on parroting the talking points of Republicans in order to *prove* how unbiased they are, have brought us to this dire predicament. Propaganda works, especially when you get it amplified for free on the TV every night.

    1. Joseph Harbin

      This is how bad it was in Biden's America, according the president of NBC News:

      "One of the most memorable segments we did was about how people in Nebraska often drive two hours roundtrip to a bakery in Omaha to save two dollars on a loaf of bread."

      So much wrong with that. Welcome to America today, the epitome of stupidity.

      1. iamr4man

        Do you think what’s happening there is idiots in Nebraska driving two hours to save two dollars or idiots at NBC News believing someone who told them they did?

        1. Joseph Harbin

          The NBC News idiocy is clearly the bigger idiocy. We don't elect the biggest idiot in the country to be president (twice now) without idiots like that running influential news organizations.

          Nebraskans may be idiots or they may be just pranking NBC. "We're driving two hours to save two dollars" has about the same truthfulness as "They're eating the dogs" in Springfield. A reasonable response would be to say it's "doubtful" or "mindbogglingly dumb." But NBC says proudly it's one of their "most memorable segments."

        2. ColBatGuano

          It was a NBC story about a particular bakery in Omaha that sells bread really cheap and so folks were driving for the super good deal ($1 a loaf or something). Everyone was buying 10 or more loaves including some woman who was driving from Lincoln, two hours away. Pretty sure folks would be buying this bread regardless of the inflation rate.

      2. dfhoughton

        To be charitable to the president of NBC and Nebraskans, they're probably traveling two hours to load their massive pickup or SUV with a month's supply of everything at Costco. So it's not just one loaf of bread.

        To be less charitable to the president of NBC, the way he put it it sounds like Nebraskans are idiots and he's no better.

  3. raoul

    To paraphrase I don’t know who, their opinions obviously arise from their Bayesian priors. Though I find curious that VR also finds the American people lazy and that we are all in need of some pain. The guy obviously talks from the many sides of his mouth. As to the topic at hand, my first question is what constitutes the “working class” today. Also, the American economy is too large and fragmented for someone to come up with generalizations about how to address specific issues- it’s a fools errand at best. That said I will counter Kaus and say we need more (better) government to even the playing field which is obviously tilted towards corporations. IT needs to be broken up, Big Ag needs to stop controlling all aspects of farm life. Pharma should be rewarded for actual improvements and not fake patents. Etc. A more robust government would could indeed help the so called working class on these and many other issues.

  4. bbleh

    So wait, are you actually saying that a couple of extremely wealthy techbros, much of whose wealth comes directly or indirectly from federally funded programs and who have explicitly expressed their opinion that the federal government needs to do more of what it already does to help them, would actually LIE about either broad economic trends affecting people other than them or about the real actions of the federal government and their effects?

    I don't know whether I'm more shocked by that or by the fact that large numbers of American voters are actually stupid low-information enough to believe the lies and vote for the party that promulgates them.

    See also Mencken regarding the theory of democracy.

  5. SamChevre

    I'd like to see a different chart (and starting in 1964 would be much more helpful than 1980 - the 1970's were fairly bad.)

    The chart I'd like to see: at what income percentile among non-college-educated men do you need to be to buy a house in Orange County, by year? (Just the basic "house price should be no more than 3x annual income" would be fine.)

    1. Anandakos

      Very few "non-college-educated" men have been able to buy a home in Orange County for fifty years. The parts of LA County east of the Harbor Freeway and Riverside County are for them.

      1. SamChevre

        I'm not sure this is true for the 1960's.

        Per the census, in 1965 10% of Americans had a college degree, and 70% of American families had incomes over $5000 a year. Google says the average house price in Orange County in 1965 was $15,000. So even if all the college degree holders were men (they weren't), roughly the top half of men without a college degree could afford a house in Orange County.

    2. Art Eclectic

      Besides the fact that Ramaswamy is 100% wrong, you are on to something with housing costs. Rising wages have not remotely kept pace with housing costs, even outside ridiculously expensive places like California.

      No amount of bureaucracy downsizing is going to fix that. The whole thing is just another smokescreen to cover reducing taxes on the wealthy. 10 points to Kaus.

      1. FrankM

        If this were true you'd see it in a declining share of people owning homes. You don't. It's just another facet of the same myth. Certainly there are places where prices have increased much faster than average. But the nature of averages dictates that there are also places where prices have increased much slower than average.

        1. SamChevre

          But you very much do see a declining share of people owning homes *in families that have only one income-earner*.

          The basic working-class wish, in my observation, is to get back to an economy where a wage-earner can support a family, including buying a house..

        2. nikos redux

          Well, they got a mortgage.

          How many will be able to pay off the inflated home before retirement and actually own it (as was the norm)?
          That would be interesting to know.

    3. iamr4man

      Do you think that perhaps the fact that the population of Orange County has doubled over the last 50 years has anything to do with the rising housing prices?

  6. skeptonomist

    When reporters, pundits and bloggers talk about the "working class" as being attracted to Trump or fed up with Democrats they are really referring to less-educated white Christians (or anyway whites), mostly males. These people have been voting for decades for the party which very obviously does not have their economic interests as a priority, because that party supports the idea of their racial and cultural supremacy. This is even more obvious with Trump. Many seem to be shocked at how he is appointing billionaires etc., but he did nothing for lower-income people during his first administration. He has always made throwaway promises about supporting working people but has fulfilled none of them.

    This is not stupidity per se, it a matter of what is most important to them, and that is the feeling of being the group on top.

  7. Ogemaniac

    I grew up in Trumpland. We were not poor, as my father was the first in his family to go to college. His degree and earnings made us middle of the middle nationwide and relatively well-off back home.

    I moved uphill from there, and have a professional degree and upper middle class coastal income. My brother stayed home, dropped out of community college, and has spent his career doing blue collar work. Without a doubt, he and his family are materially richer than we were as kids, and it’s not even close. Just about everyone up there is wildly better off than a generation prior, and to suggest otherwise is ludicrous.

    1. jte21

      Cheap consumer products imported from abroad and easier credit have made it possible to have a higher standard of living on the same income compared to 50 years ago. Even relatively poor people can afford a big flat-screen TV these days, a modest used car, decent clothes, some IKEA furniture, etc. I think a lot more people are in deep debt than they used to be and social media makes you aware 24/7 of how everyone else's life is more luxurious and exciting than yours.

  8. Dana Decker

    KD: "... Reagan/Bush administrations and made no gains under the Bush Jr. administration"

    YES! Bush Jr. is how you do it. Middle names should be eschewed in favor of generational labels (Sr. Jr.). For several years we've put up with George W Bush and George H W Bush. If they had more middle names - a distinct possibility - we'd be talking about
    George R L B M M W Bush and
    George R L B M M W D Bush, which is absurd.

  9. JohnH

    I don't think that the GOP's snake oil has been the idea of a working class struggle. Those numbers haven't kept pace on their own, without an active government and labor unions, and obviously as Kevin noted yesterday got worse in the Reagan years, the years of firing unionized workers. Regulation for worker safety, minimum and equal wages laws, policy for a stable economy, you name it, all still have a need. Inequality (economic, gender, and racial) haven't vanished.

    The snake oil is the GOP's "solution" and blaming Biden.

  10. sonofthereturnofaptidude

    Southern whites voted to keep Jim Crow for years, and tolerated corrupt, elitist government at the state and local level for decades in order to get what working class whites get from today's GOP: A sense of racial superiority and acknowledgement of their grievances. In other words, they do not vote for government that delivers material improvements. They vote the hatred in their hearts.

    Interestingly, Jimmy Carter helped bring down some of that corrupt political machinery in Georgia on his way to the presidency. He rightly saw that it wasn't just the Blacks who were getting screwed.

  11. jvoe

    I'm a big Obama fan but from 2008 to 2016 there was a ~4% drop in working class men's wages according to this graph and 6.5% increase during the Trump years. People relate to trends as much as absolute changes, and most people believe that Presidents are 'kings of the economy', and so it makes sense that Clinton lost and that working class people saw the Trump ver. 1 years as 'great'.

    Again, I don't think President's can actually control these trends but what they and their party talk about matters. Democrats need to focus discussions on what matters to the majority of people--Jobs, wages, crime, (now) inflation (JWCI). To me immigration hits a nerve with the majority of working class people because of these things rather than race. Even if immigration has minimal effect on them, unless you have a counter narrative that highlights JWCI, then immigration is discussed negatively in these terms.

    1. jte21

      You have to remember Obama inherited the Great Recession from W and between his own neoliberal advisers and Congressional Repubicans throwing sand in the gears, it took a lot longer to dig out of that than it should have. The Trump economy up to the pandemic was essentially Obama's legacy. Amnesiac American voters never seem to catch on to the Republicans blow everything up, Democrats swoop into put it all back together, but never fast enough, so we end up with more Republicans again pattern.

      1. jvoe

        I agree that the prolonged downturn was not Obama's fault, although the country could have used some more stimulatory spending and he focused on health care. His mistake was trying to cooperate with the Republicans on both when they just wanted to slow everything down. Then the Republicans took congress and gummed everything up because they can only pass tax cuts for the rich if they hold both executive and legislative branches.

        The key in all of this is the narratives and beating our idiotic press over the heads with it.

        1. RZM

          Yes, to beating our idiotic press over the heads. Remember what Trump said to one of his press secretaries : "It doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie — say it enough and people will believe you"
          Trump kept asking "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago ? " implying that somehow things were worse. How hard would it have been for the media to just repreatedly note that in 2024 we are MUCH better off than we were in 2020 in the middle of the Covid disaster ?

    2. jdubs

      Hard to know if these kind of aggregate charts are useful in any way.
      We know that literally no-one locks in a firm baseline on a set date and then uses that baseline to judge future changes.

      We know that using aggregate data for individual decisions is unlikely. Good examples here in this chart show the massive wage jump in 2020 when mostly low wage people were out of work. Was this massive unemployment surge the best economy we've ever seen? The chart makes it look that way. But we know the chart is misleading us. Other misleading periods can be seen as low wage employment expanded in the 2010s and kept the median from growing.

      Building stories around misleading data is often a bad way to build a story.....

  12. cmayo

    This is a pretty rich take. Pun intended.

    You cherry picked your dates.

    You're assuming that things weren't shit at the start of the baseline. A 0% change from "things are shit" is still "things are shit."

    1. cmayo

      In addition, try telling people whose outlooks were getting worse and then stayed bad (according to your very chart) for basically 40 years that they aren't struggling. Tone deaf.

      Then you need to remember that during those 40 years, companies were ever more wildly profitable and incomes were going way up for everybody up top.

    2. jdubs

      There are 2 different baselines.
      The discussion is about whether things are worse compared to the past. So we are looking back 20 years and 40+ years to show that this narrative doesn't hold up.

      Of course you can mythologize a different starting point to try to create a different narrative. But you might want to bring facts....don't be like the two morons that caused Kevin to create the post.

      To your point below, It's just dumb to complain that some people might be doing bad even when the average or median is doing well. Of course that's true, nobody is saying otherwise. No matter how good or bad things are, we can always find a contrary anecdote. But so what? It isn't tone deaf to talk about averages or median. Give us a break.

      1. cmayo

        My point below, as you call it, was referring to the very average that Kevin posted.

        Give us a break with your contrarianism.

        I've posted ad infinitum about costs here. I'm sick of digging up facts that Kevin clearly doesn't give a fuck about. IYKYK. But if you want to see what some relevant facts say, go look up housing costs vs. wages, percent of people who are housing-cost-burdened (in particular working class as there are some sources that break it out by economic class or quintiles), and overall productivity vs. wage share going to labor. All of those facts paint a very different picture from Kevin's fantasyland posts and your low effort "hey you, stfu" replies. Just fuck off with that shit until you demonstrate that you don't know nothing.

  13. DFPaul

    Ah, the old "but they bought a 95 inch TV at Costco for $499" argument... which no doubt is true but doesn't explain much, methinks.

    We are a species that does a lot of comparing, "keeping up with the Joneses" if you will. The issue is not that working class incomes have not mostly kept up with economic growth, but that a lot of that growth is being grabbed by the super rich, and our capitalist economy is very very responsive to that. Put more simply, businesses -- and advertisers -- make stuff for the people who have dollars, and that affects the whole culture.

    This is why in a lot of big cities in California -- like LA or San Francisco, to my knowledge -- the firefighters and police actually live in another state (Arizona or Nevada) for the housing costs and fly in and work straight for a few weeks. It's also why the local Toyota dealer was bought out by a Bentley dealer. The working class may be doing okay, but the super rich have all the extra money, and the market and the whole culture caters to them, because they've got the money to spend. The "working class" winds up feeling ignored and then votes for the candidate who seems like he'll rock the boat. The answer, to some degree anyway, is what Mickey Kaus argued for in his book many years ago. Make the public sphere really great. Every state should have a university system like the UC system, good public schools with well-paid teachers, and great parks and libraries, plus really nice public transportation. Of course a few of the Bezos's will still drive a Bentley, but it will be a lot fewer, especially proportionately. It's a place to start anyway.

    1. cmayo

      Not to mention that the "they bought an iPhone" argument: (1) moralizes spending and says that if you're struggling then you must also appear to struggle and never buy what other people see as a luxury, and (2) shows no understanding of the psychology of financial struggle.

  14. zic

    What's different is the women in those men's lives.

    Used to be, when I was a child, they stayed home and took care of too many children because they didn't have access to birth control. This is the baby boom.

    Then, the pill became commonly available, and women went to work. In vast numbers to that measure of household income is of little worth as a comparison to before; the measure needs to include hours worked. But during this time that women went to college and developed careers, they still held the majority of obligation to caring for the home and children. Their men, who grew up being cared for resented the lack of attention

    GenX women were not having any of this working full time and all the housework and child care, demanded more equality. And now, their daughters want respect, and can get by just fine without a man, particularly if he's more a burden then he's worth.

    Working class grievances amongst men are, I think, incel grievances.

    Now here's the thing: I'm not supposed to say that stuff, it discomforts men, and women get punished for it.

    Hence the last year.

    So just pretend I didn't make this comment; but if you want to understand working class men, put them in context with vast generational change among the women in men's lives. You'll do better economics that way.

    1. Salamander

      If I heard you, I'd give you a like +50. But we've got to keep this to ourselves.

      Lost privilege. It makes people embittered, resentful, vengeful, and too often , violent. See also "Civil War, Failure of Reconstruction."

  15. skeptonomist

    As usual Kevin adopts the attitude that if any little bit of economic growth trickles down to people, wherever they fit on the economic scale, they're doing fine. And that's what happened since 1973 for all wage-earners, as shown in my more general view of "production workers"

    https://www.skeptometrics.org/BLS_B8_Min_Pov.png

    and also in Kevin's last (added) graph. In terms of real (CPI) earnings, working people have not advanced at all since 1973 despite a large increase in GDP/capita. Those in the upper parts of the spectrum have been the beneficiaries of economic growth, not wage-earners.

    I agree with Kevin that there is no evidence for a particular struggle in terms of earnings since the pandemic, but that doesn't mean that wage-earners are doing well. Of course to blame Democrats for this is absurd - over this period the country has been dominated by Republican trickle-down neoliberal economics.

  16. SwamiRedux

    Kevin is so naive sometimes. "Struggling" is measured not by economic indicators but by a mindset based on what people are told by their politicians.

    1. zic

      Based on Kevin's charts, this mindset is Republican news choices such as Fox News.

      And of course some politicians who demanded their allegiance.

      But valuing ratings over honesty has obviously been a politically-failing strategy, and probably always was.

  17. nikos redux

    BILLS inform working class perceptions of the economy.
    So when (for one example) car insurance is up 54% over three years, people feel like they're struggling.

  18. KenSchulz

    This is worth reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/10/03/us-wages-have-been-rising-faster-than-productivity-for-decades/
    This is the very conservative Tim Worstall making the case, with data, for a smaller gap between productivity growth and growth in compensation than is usually claimed; then blowing smoke to argue disingenuously that there is no gap at all, and concluding falsely that “US wages have been rising faster than US productivity”.
    Worstall does not address a factor that likely accounts for a large fraction of the narrowing of the gap — the excessive price of health care in the US, as compared to other OECD countries. That exaggerates employers’ cost of labor. If medical care were a world market, the value of employers’ contributions would be less, and the productivity-compensation gap would be larger.

    1. zic

      I belive something akin to this may be true.

      If you earn $50,000, and pay $500/month for your family health insurance but don't see the$18,000 your employer pays.

      And you and I don't realize how much this cost him and how much he gets as a tax subsidy, either.

      The single best thing we could do to disrupts things -- because of Obamacare, the best with a model for success nationally, is break that link and let everybody purchase Obamacare policies they like on the exchanges.There are good reasons for this; it helps you see the things people are planning to spend on; and you can plan to have enough resources to meet those medical needs. And make sure insurance isn't paying for someone's hair implants.

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