[bryanlarsen]

In the 70's a middle class family had 1 car, a 1200 square foot house, ate out once a month, had less than a dozen sets of clothes per person (most of which were work clothes).

They felt well off, because they were doing fabulously well compared to the 30's which were still lived memory.

And because they felt secure. They did not feel in any danger of losing the essentials of housing, food, clothing and health care.

Now we have a lot more, but we've lost that feeling of security vis a vis housing & health care.

[spacemadness]

It’s always housing. We’re basically at economic war with each other. Home owners vs. non-home owners. Home owners get anxious when their house value doesn’t continue to rise past inflation. So they vote against policies that would help non home owners get into the market without drowning out of self interest.

[drivingmenuts]

Great line from Newsroom: we waged wars on poverty, not poor people …

Kind of sums things up. Likely, we’ll never see that again. Not in my lifetime, anyway.

[dragonwriter]

> They felt well off, because they were doing fabulously well compared to the 30's which were still lived memory.

Also because they were doing well, compared to past experience, relative to those higher on the income distribution.

That is, inequality narrowed throughout the post-war era until around 1980, when it turned around and shot up.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA

While the long stagnant periods in wages (Noah marks the one from the mid 1970s to mid 1990s, but ignores the one from 2001 through about 2012, perhaps because he realizes that marking most of the last 50 years, accurately, as periods of wage stagnation, rather than falsely claiming that that ended in the 1990s, would undermine the rosy picture he is painting) are a problem, the distributional dynamics are probably the thing most closely associated with the perception of a hollowed out middle class.

[alihm]

I think you nailed it, but in addition to that I also think social media boosts the lives of few wealthy people and as a result others feel they don't have enough.

[xtiansimon]

Don’t forget your job was probably giving you heath care and a pension. And if you had a job, you could be there for 10s of years, if not your whole working life.

[bryanlarsen]

I said "housing and health care" in my original post, so I agree with you on that part.

In the 70's, only a large minority of Americans had a pension. There were lots of very poor old people in the US, especially before 1972 when social security got indexed to inflation.