Escaping Poverty Requires Almost 20 Years with Nearly Nothing Going Wrong
The article is a book teaser for <i>The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy</i>, by Peter Temin at MIT. The central point, he argues, is that the top 20% professional-and-up top crust of American society has enacted structural gatekeeping processes like many years of education, and low minimum wages to systematically repress groups by race.<p>From an economist, this is a surprisingly racial thesis, where a simple economic one would do: close the door on others after they&#x27;re already in the castle. You can see this play out everywhere, from how &#x27;disruption&#x27; pivots to regulatory capture, from how homeowners fiercely guard their property values, and society self-sorts into cohorts of similar income and circumstance.<p>We&#x27;ve seen in recent years with working-class people&#x27;s backlash against neoliberal ideas of governance and trade, in Europe and the US, that the economics notion that growth creates wealth at all levels, and wealth isn&#x27;t a zero-sum game, is a perception not widely shared among everyday people. The fact is, most people perceive wealth solely in relative terms: are they better off than their neighbors, or people with similar life circumstances? Or are they plagued by the same anxiety and insecurity as people they always thought of as poorer than them?<p>Race plays into this, sure, but more in terms of shared history or the lack thereof, and of being a convenient visually-obvious indicator for a dimension of difference. The people fighting for the scraps below try to band together along dimensions they find relatable -- similar upbringing, comparable treatment by the same sorts of people, similar biases, similar goals and struggles, and race often correlates with enough difference in these life circumstances to interfere with relatability. Conversely, outside of the upper crust of society, different groups all quest for the same opportunities, where victory of one group is quite often to the economic detriment of another. Simply, every group is trying to keep another out. Those whose families have recently ascended to economic security have a vested interest in keeping large waves of additional risers out, while those competing for opportunities to be upwardly mobile are fighting over limited capacity in education, employment, and housing.