That won't hold water because we are now more productive than ever and working more hours than we have since the early 20th century.:(

Really? You think that's true overall? Normally I'd jump to agree with you since I've spent the summer watching my father working himself into an early grave doing 26 12 hour shifts a month in an understaffed ER seeing 73 patients per shift. This is the exception, not the rule or even the average. Responsible, professional people are pulling more weight than they ever have, but they are getting fairly hard to find these days. A worker who puts in 8 hours a day 50 weeks a year (2 for vacation) is not getting any sympathy from me even if they put in 20 overtime hours a month because that level of work is just baseline normal. Life was less complicated back when the term 'cutting edge technology' refered to the transistor radio and work was also less complicated. Now it's harder, you need 4 years of university to get you where highschool used to. You need a Masters Degree to equal the college certificates of the last generation, but that's how it goes. No whining allowed.

If that were true, then baby boomers should be leaving a poorer American economy. Until recented perverted by George Jr voodoo economics, the baby boomers were finally eliminating massive American government and trade inbalances.

One curious fact: preceding the great depression, wealth began to concentrate among a few 'elite'. This never reoccurred in America (as the middle class grew in numbers and percentage) until recently. We are now witnessing again, a massive concentration of wealth among the few elites.

Whereas top management once earned 14 times the income of an average worker, today that number has climbed to something well over 300. Elitism has pushed massive wealth among the few. Incoming are now falling (inflation is higher than wage increases). And yet the super rich are increasing their percentage of the American pie.

Not necessarily. I don't think the crests and troughs would correspond to the retirement of the previous generation, but rather the peak years of production around an average age of 43. As the more efficient generation slowly leaves the workforce we will see a more gradual decline than would be intuitive because there isn't a perfect line between generations. The farther you go from the main 'bump' the less productive the workers, but it's a gradual decline in and of itself. We are just now entering a downstroke in the cycle, our economy has been good overall but it's heading downhill.

As baby boomers approached and past 43, American productivity increased massively. Throughout the late seventies and early eightys, there was near zero productivity growth. Starting maybe in the late 1980 and definitely by the early 1990s, the United States began a massive productivity increase.

Baby boomers born from 1945 to 1955 means baby boomers were 43 from 1988 through 1998. Curious. That is when American productivity returned to levels not seen since the 1950s and early 1960s. Baby boomers are the generation that had it easy.

Wait a minute though, I never said anything about productivity levels. I only said it was the middle class itself that followed the pattern.

I used to believe the same sort of thing. But you know what? Wealthy people still have an advantage. Wealthy families live in more affluent areas, because they can afford to pay more for their homes, and attend better schools, since those districts can afford to pay their teachers higher salaries, and can provide better and more computers, text books, etc. Or the kids go to private school. So they get a better grade- and high- school education. Then their parents can afford to send them to an expensive, high profile college, where they rub elbows with other kids of wealthy families. And they don't even have to be especially intelligent to get into those colleges (see George W. Bush). They come out of college with a competitive edge, having a top-notch alma mater and friends whose fathers are doctors, lawyers, and indian chiefs. They have connections, get the better, higher paying jobs, and the cycle continues.

The US is NOT a meritocracy!

Well said. I truly believe there aren't any meritocracies in the world. There are systems which claim to be meritocracies.....but that just justifies inequality by making those who don't succeed as well as those that do, responsible for that lack of success. Sometimes, all the hard work of a lifetime doesn't buy success.

But, if a society claims to be meritocratous, it allows the elite to take full possession of their success. It allows them to dismiss every good break and advantage that they had by birth and tell the factory worker who works 12 hour shifts to barely keep his family, that it's his own lack of ambition or foresight that keeps him down.

"Work hard and you can achieve whatever you want" A lie that has probably dashed more hopes than I care to think about. "Make your work valuable to others and you will be secure, make yourself indispensable to those higher up than you and you will have whatever you want" is a more useful maxim. A labouror who works 10 hours a day on a construction site might work hard, but because people who can do his job are as common as water he does not produce valuable labour. It is not how hard you work, but how valuable your labour is that determines success.

And what about those who do the jobs which aren't valued? Do they deserve to live badly? Are bricklayers worthless? Not everyone can be 'successful'. Does that mean they have no merit? Surely they are the grist to your mill?

OK. I then don't follow your point.

Meanwhile working hard is little rewarded. The concept was to work smarter; not harder. (Sometimes that means a dumb person is smart enough to hire a good lawyer or join a good union.)

Everything and everyone has a value. A bricklayer has value because even if there are 1000 of them that can do a particular job, one of them has to do it. The value of semi-skilled labour might get the guy a modest appartment and a vacation to Disney Land every 15 years if he isn't stupid with his credit cards. It all depends on what you count as 'living badly'. He wouldn't be living on minimum wage also, a buddy of mine is making $11.75/h carrying boxes off trucks into K-Mart so I doubt that anything but bottom of the barrel fresh-out'a-highschool positions pay that poorly. It is not really that hard to make ends meet with a bit of smarts and commitment, your life will just be boring as hell.

Of course, if we are talking about the jaw-droppingly idiotic weirdos who pack the freezers at the Walmart I shop at, yes they do deserve to live badly. (Think of the guys from Jackass blended with a porn-addicted 13yr/old and the social savvy of a cow)

tw, my original comment was back when someone made reference to the shrinking middle class in the US. The number of people was being taken as representative of other trends and the idea struck me as interesting.

Ooooops, Aliantha: you've accepted the idea that economics is a zero-sum game. Look around you; the evidence is that it is not. Speedread Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb for how far zero-sum economic ideas can lead a prediction astray.

Economics may be a zero-sum game on a solar system-wide scale, but this doesn't seem true of planetary-scale. We are nowhere near operating on a systemwide scale yet.

And it tells me that about ten percent of the population is good at wealth. Thing is, this kind of thing is learnable. It's not exactly a matter of luck.

It's got nothing to do with economics. It has to do with limited resources. This planet cannot sustain everyone at the same level of comfort that people in western societies enjoy. Hmmm...is it de ja vous or did I just say that?