[photochemsyn]

People with large amounts of money/property/assets often do have one thing in common that explains much of this stereotype - they're afraid that someone is going to come and try to take it all away from them. If they're a wealthy family, then they're often worried that one of their family members will squander all the wealth so that's often a subject of discussion - who has access to the funds? I've known a few such families, they're often fairly miserable in their internal dynamics.

It all seems a bit futile, though, the extraction of wealth from the economy via the neoliberal program and the creation of wealthy lifestyles. What's happened in the USA is that the neoliberals vacuumed all the wealth out of the middle class, so now it's basically posh and prole with a big gap between them. It's as if it the USA has become late 19th century Britain (certainly the educational system is going that way). It has all the unpleasant vibes of a dying Empire.

One notion from the article that's very true is this: Or does she (and everyone else here) habitually exaggerate their productivity?

That's perhaps a central myth that must be maintained, that the USA is a meritocracy where hard work and hustle is the route to wealth, when in reality it has more to do with inheritance than anything else. Some people from wealthy families do squander their inheritance, but even then their social networks tend to keep them from falling below the poverty line.

The fact that most wealth is in the hands of a lazy aristocratic class that isn't (with some exceptions) using it to build new research laboratories or develop novel technologies, while China rushes full speed ahead (ever see Shenzhen?), doesn't bode well for the future of the USA.

[lotsofpulp]

> What's happened in the USA is that the neoliberals vacuumed all the wealth out of the middle class, so now it's basically posh and prole with a big gap between them.

Perhaps it had something to do with billions of people worth of labor coming online willing to work for lower prices than Americans, in conjunction with advanced in automation, computing, transportation, etc. Supply and demand, result in lower prices for the type of labor that could be done elsewhere for cheaper, and so it was. Any attempt to stop the labor arbitrage would have made the US uncompetitive on the global scale.

Seems like a simpler explanation than a conspiracy by some nebulous tribe called “neoliberals”.

[closedloop129]

>What's happened in the USA is that the neoliberals vacuumed all the wealth out of the middle class, so now it's basically posh and prole with a big gap between them.

What is preventing the former middle class proles from reorganizing and creating wealth for themselves?

[sinenomine]

Pretty obvious competitive pressure channeled upon middle class by the upper class in the US:

https://www.axios.com/2019/12/29/trump-att-outsourcing-h1b-v...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshoring#United_States

This could be summed up in a certain passe word, and this word is "globalism". There was a moment when the usual suspects were scared: occupy wall street, and colossal media and political resources were spent since then to pacify the mob, redirecting the narrative towards bottomless fractal of idpol.

I guess there is little left to do for (lower-) middle class Americans, except moving to the EU and living the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Fire_(novel) dream.

[JetSpiegel]

They are too busy working to pay the inflated rents that fuel the same elite.

[guelo]

neoliberals but not Reagan conservatives?

[photochemsyn]

It's the same picture. Reagan and Bush and Clinton and GW and Obama and Trump have all supported neoliberal trade policies that allowed US manufacturers to move production out of the country to take advantage of cheap labor. The agreements (GATT, NAFTA, WTO, TPP, etc.) were backed by all of those presidents, if not publicly than certainly privately, and now by Biden. Of course they're all just Wall Street puppets, 'democracy in America' is a bad joke, and the politicians are really best understood as little more than corporate middle managers.