Prices have risen by 54% in the United States, 32% in China and nearly 15% in the European Union between 2015 and 2024. Though policies have been implemented to increase supply and regulate rentals, their impact has been limited and the problem is getting worse
Housing access has become a critical issue worldwide, with cities that were once accessible reaching unsustainable price points. Solutions that have been proposed, like building more houses, capping rents, investing in subsidized housing and limiting the purchase of properties by foreigners have not stemmed the issue’s spread. Between 2015 and 2024, prices rose by 54% in the United States, 32% in China and by nearly 15% in the European Union (including by 26% in Spain), according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
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Salaries have not grown apace with real estate prices. In the EU, the median rent rose by 20% between 2010 and 2022, with rental and purchase prices growing by up to 48%, according to Eurostat. Underregulated markets are wreaking havoc, and in the United States and Spain, 20% of renters spend more than 40% of their income on housing, while in France, Italy, Portugal and Greece, that percentage varies between 10% and 15%, according to the OECD. Many countries have created programs aimed at increasing the future supply of public housing, but their effectiveness has yet to be determined and analysts say that results will be limited if smarter regional planning decisions are not made.
There is no middle class - there is the working class and the exploiter class. People have misidentified a chunk of the relatively better off working class as somehow not part of the working class. Over time the systems of capitalism and the power imbalances at the heart of the non-unionized workplace will eventually reduce better off workers to the lowest common denominator as the exploiter class demands perpetually growing profit that must come at the cost of the working class.
I was reading a finance book from 2024 talking about “The middle class” and included things like they use check cashing places, loan stuff from rent-a-center, and then struggle to pay for food. The author is a financial “expert”.
Middle class was the owning class in feudal societies, the emergence of the working class and rule of law kind of deleted the status of the aristocracy and largely pushed the aristocracy and middle class into the owning and ruling classes.
Middle class is, mostly, simply the newfangled term for that portion of the proletariat which isn’t lumpen which is now called the precariat. Low-rank petite bourgeois also counts as the same class as it’s actually an economical one (petit bourgeois get shafted amply by capital), not political (what with their penchant for temporarily embarrassed millionaire narratives and support of “business-friendly” policies). That worker / petit bourgeois distinction has always been fuzzy and awkward I mean it’s not like there’s not workers who think like that.
This is posted in lemmy.world so while I appreciate the information I don’t think I’m alone in saying that 90% of the terms you wrote might as well be another language entirely (I get that they literally are from another language lol)
If you’re making 50k it’s hard to be convinced someone making 300k…like your boss…or their boss is “part of your struggle”.
Your comment is extremely naive.
If you work for your money, you’re part of the struggle. If you own for your money, you’re part of the problem.
The problem is capital and it always has been. Sure, there’s a concerted effort by capital to deflect the anger due to them onto CEOs and the like but we have to be smart enough and worldly wise enough not to fall for it.
But the middle class is those who are able to leverage working for their money to accumulate capital to where they can live off of the proceeds of that owned capital. If you’re able to retire, you eventually become part of the ownership class.
There is a shrinking middle class but the actual people in it are those who split their adult lives into eventually retiring on their wealth, accumulated through working.
Thats not not what middle class means.
Middle class generally means people whose incomes are in the middle half (ranging from 40th to 60th percentile to the 20th to 80th).
If you want to pull out your own new definition based on whether their income comes from work or from return on investments, then I’d still point out there’s a large number of people who do both, especially when compared across the entire life cycle including retirement. So if you insist on this alternative definition, you still have to account for the big chunk of the population who do both.
I have to admire the brazenness with which you made up your own utterly unfounded definition of the term “middle class” then, immediately after being called out for it, accuse the person who hadn’t provided any definition of the term of doing exactly what you had just done.
Thats some advanced level bad faith engagement right there.
Its not my definition. Its a different school of thought that has stood up to scrutiny. It is different to what a lot of people would refer to as middle class and, of course, different again from what you, personally describe middle class to be.
I don’t really recognise a middle class but, if one is to exist, it is simply the middle earners of people who work for their money and they’re predominantly white collar workers. That’s all there is to it. What you described is petite bougouise and may well be middle class but not all middle class people are petite bougouise.
I’m specifically pointing out the problem with the “how they earn income” definition, that it seemingly assumes that the two categories are mutually exclusive, to try to argue that there’s no such thing as a middle class They’re not. Most people who are in what most would recognize as “middle class” under the traditional definition get income through both methods, especially over the course of their lifetimes.
So even under that definition, which attempts to pretend there isn’t a middle class, there is still a middle class: those who have income through both methods, or even hybrid methods (ownership of an actively managed business that allows them to earn money while working but wouldn’t earn money without their own labor).
It would be a very small amount, compared to what they earn over their lifetime. The idea that someone is middle class because they’ve earned a penny in bank interest is absurd.
Or are you planning on coming back with a load of caveats you conveniently left out previously?
Using your logic… if you’re making 50k, it’s hard to convince someone making $20k is part of the struggle.
You really think people who make $300k are out there buying lambos and eating fine dining every night?
No shit, that’s the whole point of what he’s saying. It’s hard to be convinced becuse that’s part of the strategy.
There’s really only two classes: People with “fuck you” money and people without “fuck you” money.
Sure, they are technically part of the working class, but they’re similar to cops. Cops aren’t the owning class, they take down a salary, but they’re also class traitors.
The middle class - aka professional managerial class - as a group fulfill a similar role of keeping the rest of the working class in line in exchange for certain privileges. They just use paychecks and memorandums rather than guns and laws.
Also like cops, they provide an ideological shield for capitalists. Cops are overtly the “thin blue line” between “order and chaos”. The middle class are a shield for aspirations. People are encouraged to identify as middle class so they think they have something to lose if they were to upset the status quo.
So it makes sense to identify this group, but too often it’s as a shield. Like the implication in this article that a housing crisis for the middle class is a huge problem, but who cares about the housing precarity that’s existed in the working class since its inception? Well one reason it would be a big problem for the ruling class is that they would lose their buffer. If it’s just lords and serfs and a sharp distinction between them, then overturning the whole thing is a lot easier to contemplate.
I get where you’re going with this, and yeah, the PMC helps hold the current system in place. I was thinking about the cybersecurity/engineers/architects/other better paid workers who are still subject to class exploitation even though they’re better off than a line cook.
Also, I like your bit about the professional managerial class being an ideological shield - I see that happening in the workplace all the time where people won’t consider rocking the boat because they want to be management one day.
I thought I’d have to explain this part - the technical knowledge workers are also managerial, but in a more indirect way.
All three of the professions you listed make decisions about the function of the systems that workers use every day. They are responsible for taking the policy decisions that are made to serve the owning class, and giving those policies shape.
They literally design our environment, and as the Well There’s Your Problem podcast points out, engineering and other technical decisions are political. The preferences of the bosses are built into them.
I guess this is pretty unpopular though. I guess there are a lot of knowledge workers on this platform and they don’t like being compared to cops.
I believe I’m one of those knowledge workers. I do cybersecurity and I’m actively working on trying to unionize the sector. I’m not management, and I don’t have hiring or firing power, and I’m reliant on wages to survive.
Actually, I can see the comparison. Many cybersecurity people don’t challenge the power relations in their workplace and instead act as enforcers of corporate policy. That always disappoints me, and I can see the pattern of how even our relative privilege is being actively reduced. I just hope more cybersecurity people will recognize the class struggle we have to wage and organize in solidarity with the rest of the working class.
With your username I’m not surprised you’re in cybersecurity lol.
And I never said all managers are bastards. I said that they act that way as a group.
Ultimately the incentive structure reinforces PMC workers who toe the company line. It could never be any other way in a capitalist framework. Yes, it’s possible for knowledge workers to operate outside capitalist organisations, but they are going to have a harder time with less money. The bulk of the work will always be done where the money is. You see this very clearly in FOSS circles - the work involves people who are either too tired from their 9 to 5 to put a lot of effort in, they’re the sort of person who can’t work in a capitalist org, or they’re paid by a capitalist org which will have certain demands on their work. The result is that FOSS tends to be rough around the edges which inherently reinforces the belief that only top-down capitalist structures can make polished software.
You’ll find knowledge workers in general are going to be hard to unionise. They are better compensated and privileged so they have more to lose, and they have to adopt the ideology of their bosses to some extent in order to reproduce it in their work. We’ve seen union action with actors and writers for a long time, and it seems to be bleeding over from them into the videogame space. I hope it will keep spilling over into other technical spaces, but I don’t think we can rely on that happening to fundamentally change the character of that class.
I’ve seen that reinforcement of workers who toe the line first-hand, people are scared and brainwashed into not acting up or demanding better. It’s why I have a hard time maintaining a job - not because I’m not good at what I do, but because I’m bad at pretending to buy into the capitalist ideology in the workplace.
Agreed, not all managers are bastards but the system they are working within creates horrible results.
Yep. I’ve never been middle class though I’ve done better than some. I am not really successful in the traditional sense.