This is a better piece than the tweet below suggests. 1/

It's true, as Matt says, that the fact that a "successful middle-class life" has grown expensive is a consequence of growth and affluence altering norms and material expectations, of macroeconomic success from a certain perspective rather than poverty or failure. 2/

It's also true that you can't afford to live a "successful middle-class life" on terms that you could in the 1950s or 60s. 2/

No number or chart can resolve the question of whether the new set of trade-offs — richer in certain material senses, but less free to opt out of market-remunerated activity and still live a "successful middle-class life" — is better or worse. 3/

A separate question is whether achieving and maintaining a "successful middle-class life" had grown more or less exclusive than it used to be. 4/

I think that it has grown profoundly more exclusive, because the norms that define a "successful middle-class life" are defined by an upper-middle-class that has grown more numerous, but also increased a wealth and income gap, from the median household. They set a higher standard. 5/

(Of course, a "successful middle-class life" has grown profoundly *less* exclusive across dimensions like race or being openly queer. To say the achievement has grown "more exclusive" involves collapsing these different dimensions, and arguing the class dimension overwhelms these dimensions.) 6/

Nevertheless, I think much of our catastrophe — and we are living a social catastrophe that threatens everything once good about our country — derives from an *accurately perceived* decline, especially by people not of formerly disfavored groups… 7/

both in the likelihood of achieving what we contemporaneously understand to be a "successful middle-class life", and with respect to the sacrifices one typically has to make, both in time, and in accepting amoral, often immoral, market discipline. 8/

The cost of being a "successful middle-class person" is to be less free along certain dimensions, and (on average, not always) less virtuous with respect to ones source of remuneration, than a "successful middle-class person" would have been sixty years ago. 9/

And it's harder to achieve. /fin