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Welcome to the Future: Downward Mobility and Social Depression
Welcome to the Future: Downward Mobility and Social Depression
If you don’t think these definitions apply, please check back in a year.
The mainstream is finally waking up to the future of the American Dream: downward mobility for all but the top 10% of households. A recent Atlanticarticle fleshed out the zeitgeist with survey data that suggests the Great Middle Class/Nouveau Proletariat is also waking up to a future of downward mobility: The Downsizing of the American Dream: People used to believe they would someday move on up in the world. Now they’re more concerned with just holding on to what they have.
I dug into the financial and social realities of what it takes to be middle class in today’s economy: Are You Really Middle Class?
The reality is that the middle class has been reduced to the sliver just below the top 5%–if we use the standards of the prosperous 1960s as baseline.
The downward mobility isn’t just financial–it’s a decline in political power, control of one’s work and income-producing assets. This article reminds us of what the middle class once represented: What Middle Class? How bourgeois America is getting recast as a proletariat.
The costs of trying to maintain a toehold in the upper-middle class are illuminated in these recent articles on health and healthcare–both part of the downward mobility:
Health Care Slavery and Overwork
How a toxic workplace could, literally, destroy your health
We’re afraid our work is killing us, and we are right
This reappraisal of the American Dream is also triggering a reappraisal of the middle class in the decades of widespread prosperity: The Myth of the Middle Class: Have Most Americans Always Been Poor?
And here’s the financial reality for the bottom 90%: declining real income:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Our Social Depression
Our Social Depression
This erosion of opportunities to complete life’s stages and core dramas is rarely recognized, much less addressed.
The consequences of economic stagnation are not limited to finance: stagnation is causing a social depression. We can best understand this social depression by examining how the natural stages of human life are being disrupted.
Each stage has various tasks, goals and duties, which establish the foundation for the next stage.Confucian thought views life as a developmental process with seven stages, each roughly corresponding to a decade: childhood, young adulthood (16-30), age of independence (30-39), age of mental independence (40-49), age of spiritual maturity (50-59), age of acceptance (60-69), and age of unification (70 – end of life).
I see each stage as centered on a core human drama: for the teenager, establishing an identity and life that is independent of parents; for the young adult, finding a mate and establishing a career; for the middle-aged, navigating the challenges of raising children and establishing some measure of financial security; for those in late middle-age, helping offspring reach independent adulthood and caring for aging parents; early old age, seeking fulfillment now that life’s primary duties have been accomplished and managing one’s health; and old age, the passage of accepting mortality and the loss of vitality.
The End of Secure Work and the diminishing returns of financialization are disrupting these core human dramas and frustrating those who are unable to proceed to the next stage of life:
1. Teenagers are being pressured to focus their lives on achieving a conventional financial success (see “Training for Discontent” in From Left Field) that is becoming harder to achieve.
2. Young adults without secure full-time careers cannot afford marriage or children, so they extend the self-absorption of late adolescence into middle age.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
