About 63 percent of adults in Sheboygan make between $41,641 and $124,924, meaning the area has one of the highest shares of middle-class households in the country, according to a report from the Pew Research Center. Nationally, only 51 percent of adults are middle-class.
Wisconsin is, for the middle class, the promised land. Four out of the top 10 metropolitan areas with the highest share of middle-income families are in Wisconsin ..
.. Those areas have what other parts of America once had in spades: a big manufacturing sector, strong unions, good schools, and a low cost of living.
.. Pew defines middle-income households as those with an income two-thirds to double that of the overall median household income.
.. In Sheboygan, middle-class median income fell 17 percent, from $80,281 to $66,719, according to Pew. This was the biggest drop in income of any middle-class area, though nationally, middle-class households lost ground in 222 of 229 metropolitan areas from 1999 to 2014.
.. The only way the company could stay and remain competitive was to pay the same low wages that new manufacturing employees made in the rest of the country, he wrote.
.. Now, workers like Bob Bastasic still earn $34 an hour at Kohler, but new employees can’t make much more than $18.
.. The share of Americans living in middle-class households has declined to just over 50 percent today, from 61 percent in 1970
.. They turn people who were once full-time employees into contractors, cut back on wages and benefits, and do everything possible to maximize productivity without sharing those gains with the workers.
.. Those with very high wages make 41 percent more than they did in 1979, while middle-wage workers earn just 6 percent more
.. the size of the upper-middle class, defined as a family-of-three making at least $100,000, grew to 29.4 percent of the population in 2014, from 12.9 percent in 1979.
.. Indeed, in 1979, the poor and middle class earned 70 percent of all incomes and the rich and upper middle class earned 30 percent, according to the Urban Institute. By 2014, those groups had swapped, with the poor and middle class earning just 37 percent of all incomes, with the rich and upper middle class earning 63 percent
After ‘Brexit,’ Finding a New London for the Financial World to Call Home
Here are the criteria most frequently mentioned: English-language facility, which is essential for attracting a global work force; a favorable regulatory environment, especially regarding employment; excellent transportation and communications infrastructure; availability of prime office space and luxury housing; good schools; good restaurants and cultural offerings; and finally, an intangible quality that includes a certain energy level and openness to an influx of highly paid, competitive City of London-Wall Street types.
I scored numerous cities in the European Union on a 60-point scale: five points for office space and housing, five points for restaurants and cultural offerings — because it’s easier for any city to build new offices and housing, and import talented chefs and entertainers — and 10 points for each of the others.
.. Every financial services executive I interviewed mentioned an intangible factor: French hostility to the wealthy. President François Hollande tried to impose a 75 percent “wealth tax,” which prompted an exodus of rich French citizens before Mr. Hollande dropped the proposal.
“All the noise coming out of the Élysée Palace the last few years has been that France wants to tax or regulate financial service companies out of business,” Mr. Yeandle said. “Financial services people are furious.”
.. Even as most people I spoke with said Frankfurt would most likely emerge as the next London, they didn’t seem very enthusiastic about it. Some already think there’s too much power in Germany — and that London has acted as a financial counterbalance.
.. The problem? Badly hurt by the financial crisis, the Dutch have capped bankers’ bonuses at just 20 percent of their annual salaries — a far more drastic curb than was imposed by the European Union. Several bankers told me that unless the Dutch repealed the cap, they wouldn’t consider moving to Amsterdam. “I’d love to relocate to Amsterdam,” one top executive told me. “But I don’t think we’re wanted there.”
Wonkblog Why the upper middle class might be the real target of today’s anger
Why, he wondered, does Mercedes-Benz advertise on television?
.. It was a simple way of asking why luxury brands focus resources on appealing to a mass audience of U.S. consumers, particularly at a time when technology is making it easier to micro-target the very rich. The answer, his research found, is that there might be more buying power in a particular group of consumers — people he calls the upper middle class — than other economists have estimated.
.. Rose defines the upper middle class as households earning the equivalent of $100,000 to $349,999 a year for a family of three, in 2014 dollars. (For a single worker, that equivalent works out to just less than $58,000 a year.)
.. The upper middle class grew from just less than 13 percent of the U.S. population in 1979 to nearly 30 percent in 2014
.. The poor and the middle class are not so much angry at the top 1 percent, he says, as they are at the upper middle class — the people who used to be middle class like them but who now live in nicer houses and drive sports cars and, Rose says, maybe look down on the workers left behind in their rise.
Intertwingled: Chapman University: Morning Session # 2: 4/24/2014
Dan Rosenberg: Historian University of OregonWithin bodies of writing, everywhere, there are linkages we tend not to see. The individual document, at hand, is what we deal with; we do not see the total linked collection of the all at once. But they are there, the documents not present as well as those that are, and the grand cat’s-cradle among them all.-Ted Nelson, Literary Machines (5 min)The original French 18th century Encyclopedia was conceived of as hypertext (~10-11 min)In real life, that is to say, on paper (laugh) (13 min)Literature is debugged: ideas that “work”The enlightenment thinkers were anti-Aristotelian (scholasticism)Jaron: a gigantic fall from grace which is the opposite of moore’s law (32 min)We have to gradually find our way back to Ted (33 min)If you can remember the provenance for where bits come from, you can use that as the basis for a micropayment system.Ted’s system of micropayments is the solution to the left-right (Marx – Ayn Rand) dilemmaJaron to Xerox people: You should reference stuff, rather than copying it (45 min)“Don’t worry be crappy.” Silicon valley’s path to riches is spreading fast and getting users (48 min)Fortunes have been made trying to construct backlinks: Google
- the effect on society is extreme privatization (incomplete designs lead to to income inequality) (49-51 min)
- mere openness is not enough, there has to be the ability to use the information
- successful open source software projects have a middle class (lots of small contributors)
- context-free openness has led to the decline of the middle class
- we are concentrating the wealth in the processors rather than the ones doing the work: google has to scrape the web for fresh translations to power there translation software.
- We have to disenfranchise the creators of content by forgetting provenance
- There were to kinds of young men (hippie, military redneck) (1 hr 01 min) that wanted to destroy provenance
- Hippies: want to limit government power through anonymity
- Redneck: CB radio with anonymous handles, used to avoid police (1 hr 03 min)
- The provenance has to be a kind that benefits the people who are not private. Ted’s ideas are the solution to that.
- Its going to take a while to turn it around (1 hr 6 min)
Noah Wardip Fruin
All simulation is political, a primary form of representation, governed by rules
- Kodu: shooting is a top level. Saying is a sub-menu. Relationships are totally absent. (~1 hr 10 min – 1 hr 20 min)
We want to educate people who will disrupt the tech status quo, rather than fill a pipeline (1 hr 20 min)