The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)
>We can see, too, that these bifurcations are driven by a shift from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance.To me all these bifurcations seem to me to stem from a change of a world of more evenly distributed wealth (for working, lower middle, and middle class) and one with wild inequality.It's a world where a 10-20% can afford the "whatever" (e.g. best phone, live in NY/Bay area, university degree, etc) and the rest have to scrap by and increasingly pinch pennies (while still doing some desperate wealth-signalling purchases, like poor urban blacks that buy $200 sneakers to feel like they have something nice and can participate in the kind of society they see in ads).Back in the 50s and up to the 80s a signle-income middle class household could still send a kid to college, buy a house, and so on. And living in NY or the Bay are was still very affordable (to the point that both areas had large artistic / bohemian communities living there, and not of the latte sipping urban wealth variety, but the penny pinching / stick it to the man / junky variety).