The middle class is over, it's not coming back

Douglas Coupland has written "A radical pessimist's guide to the next ten years" in which he says:

Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? That’s where all the other jobs that once made us middle-class are going – to that same, magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel-agency jobs vanished, never to return.

Ignoring his canadian/american use of "middle class" and the fact that he's deliberately overstating the case, there's a truth there.

In the US and the UK the richest are getting richer. The number of people seeing no growth or reduced wages and benefits is growing. And slowly, the real middle, the relatively comfortable middle of the wage distribution, is shrinking. More on why this is happening in other posts.

Over the next ten years, we're going to have to learn a new language for public policy statistics. The word "average", which is already confusing, works even less well when there are two groups at either end of the scale moving in different directions.

Which sounds wonky and abstract. But if you don't have an "average" that everyone can identify with a little bit, it gets less likely that either end of society will care about the concerns of the other.

Thankfully we've got a tory government. I'm sure that reversing this polarisation is right at the top of their priority list...