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Reasons to Doubt the Middle Class Can Be Saved
Short of a major breakthrough or crisis, the country's economic makeup is unlikely to change
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The American middle class has been slowly thinning for years, but the Great Recession is accelerating that process. Median incomes are declining and the housing market has collapsed. The consumer recovery, such as it is, appears to be driven by the affluent, not the masses. While the rich and well-educated are putting the recession behind them, the rest of America is stuck in neutral or reverse.
To assess the widening divide between the super-rich and everyone else, we invited cover story writer Don Peck and three other experts – James Fallows, Maria Kefalas, Tyler Cowen – to discuss the state of the economy and the problems facing the middle class.
Short of a major breakthrough or crisis, the country's economic makeup is unlikely to change
There may be ways to help the middle class without huge economic changes
How can the problem be solved if people don't even agree what's wrong?
It's not that the elite doesn't care about the rest of the country--it may not even think about it
Why the country may not be suited to save the middle class as we know it
If the middle class is falling apart and getting poorer, why hasn't society become more lawless?
The country's middle class has stagnated—but it can be revitalized
The economy is experiencing a downward spiral that's pushing people out of the middle and down the income ladder
Upward mobility has drawn immigrants to the U.S. for hundreds of years, but today it doesn't seem to be guaranteed even for those born in America
Resiliency to adversity is great, but not indifference to the decline of the country's middle class
A bad economy doesn't ruin all of a person's life
