The “working class struggle” is a myth

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

All for downsizing the bureaucracies, but this seems like BS. Long term trends have shifted the balance against the working class 1) Increasing returns to skill/education 2) Trade (unskilled labor performed abroad) and 3) Immigration (unskilled labor comes here). Maybe AI will… https://t.co/90qGy1cpMB

— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) December 30, 2024

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.

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Author Of article : Kevin Drum

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