In Reply to: I think I understand what happened... posted by Gainsborough on November 08, 2024 at 16:46:49
All the graphs I see date back to the 60s or 70s. The 80s under Reagan saw the acceleration of the growing gap.
How about before WW II? We had the Great Depression. Before that, the roaring 20s. Then there was the Guilded Age. In the 1800s and before, most of the world including the west lived in extreme poverty.
Didn't we enjoy a thriving middle class only for about 3 decades after WWII? Wasn't it an anomaly in the nation's history? Another anomaly was the Progressive Age in the early 1900s which brought the working class out of poverty, thanks to labor rights. That too came crashing down when the Great Depression hit.