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
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)
Is the U.S. Ready for Post-Middle-Class Politics?
A particular vision of the American dream has shaped elections for decades. What happens when people stop believing in it?
.. Last spring, a Gallup poll found that the percentage of respondents who identified as middle class or upper middle class dropped 12 percent since the 2008 financial crisis; nearly half of those polled identified themselves as either working or lower class.
.. Yet in its reversal, the campaign inadvertently revealed just how ill equipped American politics is for a post-middle-class nation
.. The new middle-class utopia did, of course, exclude most nonwhite Americans.
.. in 1959 the black poverty rate was still 56 percent, and blacks on average earned 53 percent what whites did.
.. Democrats’ hold on the white middle class was balanced precariously on the racial status quo — which, by the mid-1960s, was breaking apart. George Wallace, the segregationist Democratic governor of Alabama who ran for president in 1964 in protest of Lyndon B. Johnson’s turn toward civil rights, performed well not just in the South but also in white blue-collar enclaves in the few Northern states where he was on the primary ballot.
.. Ronald Reagan’s campaign aired its “Morning in America” ad, a Vaseline-lensed montage of overwhelmingly white suburban prosperity. Walter Mondale — the son of a small-town Minnesota minister whose politics radiated an austere, Scandinavian morality — spent the last days of his campaign unfurling increasingly dire pictures of urban and rural poverty and beseeching people to vote for an “America of fairness.”
.. Speaking bitterly of Reagan’s commercial, he told a crowd at a church in Cleveland: “It’s all picket fences and puppy dogs. No one’s hurting. No one’s alone. No one’s hungry. No one’s unemployed. No one gets old. Everybody’s happy.” But Americans liked the picket fences and puppy dogs.
.. not being black was what constituted being middle class.”
.. This is where you draw the line if you’re interested not in absolute wealth but in the trajectory of wealth — not whether you have a yacht docked in St. Bart’s, but whether you’re doing better than you were five years ago.
The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans
Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to pay for an emergency. I’m one of them.
The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all.
.. “You are more likely to hear from your buddy that he is on Viagra than that he has credit-card problems,” says Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist
.. Part of the reason I hadn’t known is that until fairly recently, economists also didn’t know, or, at the very least, didn’t discuss it. They had unemployment statistics and income differentials and data on net worth, but none of these captured what was happening in households trying to make a go of it week to week, paycheck to paycheck, expense to expense.
.. So if you really want to know why there is such deep economic discontent in America today, even when many indicators say the country is heading in the right direction, ask a member of that 47 percent.
.. A 2014 Bankrate survey, echoing the Fed’s data, found that only 38 percent of Americans would cover a $1,000 emergency-room visit or $500 car repair with money they’d saved.
.. There isn’t much net worth to draw on. Median net worth has declined steeply in the past generation—down 85.3 percent from 1983 to 2013 for the bottom income quintile, down 63.5 percent for the second-lowest quintile, and down 25.8 percent for the third, or middle, quintile.
.. A family in the middle quintile, with an average income of roughly $50,000, could continue its spending for … six days. Even in the second-highest quintile, a family could maintain its normal consumption for only 5.3 months.
.. the study by Lusardi, Tufano, and Schneider found that nearly one-quarter of households making $100,000 to $150,000 a year claim not to be able to raise $2,000 in a month.
.. That effectively let big national banks issue credit cards everywhere at whatever interest rates they wanted to charge, and it gave the banks a huge incentive to target vulnerable consumers just the way, Emmons believes, vulnerable homeowners were targeted by subprime-mortgage lenders years later.
.. With the rise of credit, in particular, many Americans didn’t feel as much need to save.
.. The personal savings rate peaked at 13.3 percent in 1971 before falling to 2.6 percent in 2005. As of last year, the figure stood at 5.1 percent, and according to McClary, nearly 30 percent of American adults don’t save any of their income for retirement.
.. in general, the more sophisticated a country’s credit and financial markets, the worse the problem of financial insecurity for its citizens.
.. I never wanted to keep up with the Joneses. But, like many Americans, I wanted my children to keep up with the Joneses’ children, because I knew how easily my girls could be marginalized in a society where nearly all the rewards go to a small, well-educated elite.
.. and because—another choice—we believed they had earned the right to attend good universities, universities of their choice, we found ourselves in a financial vortex. (I am not saying that universities are extortionists, but … universities are extortionists.
.. I was making exactly what I had made 20 years earlier. And I wasn’t alone. Real hourly wages—that is, wage rates adjusted for inflation—peaked in 1972; since then, the average hourly wage has essentially been flat. (These figures do not include the value of benefits, which has increased.)
.. In a 2010 report titled “Middle Class in America,” the U.S. Commerce Department defined that class less by its position on the economic scale than by its aspirations: homeownership, a car for each adult, health security, a college education for each child, retirement security, and a family vacation each year.
.. A 2014 analysis by USA Today concluded that the American dream, defined by factors that generally corresponded to the Commerce Department’s middle-class benchmarks, would require an income of just more than $130,000 a year for an average family of four.
.. A 2014New York Times poll found that only 64 percent of Americans said they believed in the American dream
.. I suspect our sense of impotence in the face of financial difficulty is not only a source of disillusionment, but also a source of the anger that now infects our national politics, an anger that gets displaced onto undocumented immigrants or Chinese trade or President Obama precisely because we are unable or unwilling to articulate its true source.