The current mini-essay series on System Failure is about the dirty tricks that have been played on the middle class during the 20th century:
After getting stuck with the bill for the New Deal in the 1930s, it took several decades for the wealthiest Americans to exact revenge. Their big chance came in the 1970s, when computers began supercharging worker productivity. Suddenly, a clerk equipped with spreadsheet software could instantly run calculations that once took days for a whole team. With the arrival of international air travel and instant telecommunications, American business owners could also access cheap overseas labor and fire their expensive domestic workforces. At home, the net result of all this technology was a collapse in demand for old-fashioned human labor. And less demand in any market means lower prices. Worker productivity continued to soar in the decades since the 1970s. The cost of living spiked too. But the price of labor, or wages, remained stagnant. As employers profit from productivity gains they don’t have to pay for, the middle class is being squeezed out of existence, effectively reversing the New Deal.
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