The middle class

[John Clark]

Americans like to think they live in a meritocracy but they don't, the truth is if you're born poor in the USA and are talented you're less likely to get rich than if you were born in other advanced countries, particularly one of the Scandinavian socialist countries. Take a look at this graph, it's informally called "The Great Gatsby Curve" by economists and is a plot of the Gini coefficient for several industrialized countries (a measure of economic inequality) against economic mobility (the likelihood if you're born in one economic class you'll die in the same economic class):  

The Great Gatsby Curve

As you can see the USA is in the extreme upper right of the plot and that is exactly where you don't want to be; enormous economic inequality and little economic mobility, the same conditions that occurred just before the French Revolution. The only reason there hasn't already been blood in the streets is probably because the poor are unrealistically optimistic about getting rich. Here is another interesting graph, it plots several country's actual economic mobility against the perceived economic mobility with the diagonal line representing an accurate assessment of posabilities. As you can see Americans are far too optimistic while most other countries are somewhat too pessimistic, only the Italians get it about right and see things as they actually are:  

Actual Mobility Versus Perceived Mobility

So we're sitting on a time bomb and the only thing stopping it from going off is a misperception by the poor and lower middle class, but it's only a matter of time before they wise up and when they do I suggest you invest in guillotine futures.

 John K Clark      See what's on my new list at  Extropolis