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The Coming Death Of The Middle Class: Your Biggest Opportunity

This article is more than 9 years old.

The middle class is almost dead. But perhaps there’s no reason to grieve. For one thing, the American middle class that followed World War II may have been a historical anomaly—a quirk of fate that lulled tens of millions of Americans into a false sense that we were entitled to economic stability and reckless consumerism. It’s time to snap out of it and realize that great things are more possible than ever, but according to a different set of rules.

My late father would tell me about how, in New York in the early 1960s, he toiled at a desk in Western Electric, as one engineer sitting at a desk in a sea of desks staffed by white-shirt clad engineers. (Feeling insecure as the only non-white person there, Dad wore his coat at all times, to feel more “equipped” for battle).

Western Electric, of course, is no more. Those were stable and prosperous times, my father noted decades later … Well, unless you were black or gay or a woman who wanted the freedom to break through various glass ceilings.

Today, opportunity in America has spread well beyond white males and the occasional overachieving Pakistani guy like my father. So has economic uncertainty.

People on both ends of the political spectrum like to point fingers in different directions for the uncertainty and anxiety. But it’s not about blame, it’s about accepting that the new uncertainty of our times is pretty much what civilization has always put up with, aside from that brief, glorious blip in which some Americans enjoyed spectacular economic and consumer power that exceeded the amount of effort they had to put into a job.

World War II pulled women into the workforce to fill the places filled by 16 million men sent to fight overseas, author James Altucher has noted. Women remained in the workplace after the men returned, boosting household incomes and allowing people to splurge on second cars, refrigerators, televisions and suburban homes. Those houses were cleverly packaged by Fannie Mae as the pinnacle, the confirmation, of the American Dream.

But who said that particular version of the dream would or should last? Does it mean anything for you today? And can you count on being able to work toward it for the rest of your career and retired life?

“Your Boss Hates You”

The good news is that there is a great deal of money out there. “The stock market has a capitalization of several trillion dollars,” Altucher has written. “There’s another $2 trillion in private equity funds. There’s $50 trillion in transactions in the global economy every year.”

But it’s not being distributed in the way that it used to, as we move into something of a feast-or-famine economic system. Yes, people who are considered the “pawns” of the current system will increasingly be unemployed or underemployed. But so too will today’s kings, queens and bishops. No one can get cocky here.

“Your bosses simply hate you,” according to Altucher. He says your boss plans to get rid of you as soon as she can; and then, as soon as possible, her boss will get rid of her.

“Hate” is too strong a word, if you ask me. I’ve got a few bosses in my life, and I can almost guarantee you that not all of them hate me. Some even seem to like me (they really like me!). But I’ll concede the larger point: Even the bosses and mentors who care about you can’t really make your fortune or your future.

Flushed Dreams

“Everyone is toilet paper now,” Altucher delicately and cheerfully put it in his 2013 book, Choose Yourself: Be Happy, Make Millions, Live the Dream. “The country has been out of a recession since 2009. Four years now. But the jobs have not come back. Everyone is getting fired."

Why? Because, he wrote, “ZERO sectors in the economy are moving toward more full-time workers. Everything is either being cut back, moved toward outsourcing out of the country, or hiring temp workers. And this goes not just for low-paid industrial workers, but middle managers, computer programmers, accountants, lawyers, and even senior executives.”

Okay, So What Now?

Altucher has argued that homes and educations are no longer necessary, and that they’re in fact “leashes that society has created to hold you down and prevent you from growth.” I’m willing to agree with the part about houses but probably not about education. Still, it’s true that no one should sit around counting on economic security just because they wore a square hat and picked up a sheepskin at some stuffy ceremony. And they shouldn’t blame the colleges for “failing” them (Of course, I say this with the self-interest of someone who works in higher education administration).

You’ve probably got several million-dollar ideas, at a time that most of the traditional barriers to enacting ideas have been swept away. Altucher has championed the case of Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, Inc., as evidence that anyone can turn a decent idea into an empire. Blakely wanted better-fitting hosiery and shapewear, and she realized she needed to design and produce it herself. When millions of other women had the same need she did, she became a Forbes-certified billionaire.

There’s a world of risk out there. It’s a new Wild West. As this new world is taking shape, many people still refuse to recognize how different it is. They’re the complainers, the whiners, the people who are ironically at maximum risk of being left behind.

Like the old Wild West, this new Wild West is a bit lawless and capricious. But it offers riches (both spiritual and financial) to those who move forward with courage.

I agree with Altucher that, to find those riches, we’ll each need to “choose ourselves,” over and over, like pioneers who feel called to new frontiers because the old world is no longer a place that can give us what we need. Fortunately, America’s very DNA is made up of a drive to leave behind old worlds in search of new ones. That means that, amid the uncertainty, this generation has a chance to find something greater than if the uncertainty had never existed.

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