Matthew Yglesias looks at the middle class and concludes
It’s not like households in the second quintile of the distribution don’t have refrigerators or chairs. They just have cheaper stuff. It’s perfectly possible for people in the top three quintiles to downshift their spending on these household durables without plunging into some kind of universe of inconceivable material deprivation. Individual households find themselves being downwardly mobile all the time. A second lost decade would just be a
society-wide spat of downward mobility. Households in the top quintile
spend an average of $5,000 a year on net vehicle purchases. At the median
it’s only $2,320. And yet the median American household is equipped with
functioning automobiles. Overall spending could plummet and people would
still be able to get around
If some people have to make do with a cheaper automobile it’s not a tragedy, the problem is for the bottom quintile they will experience significant hardship especially if we cut back on public transportation and create less walkable cities. I think we spend too much time worrying about the top two quarters of our country and not enough worrying about the bottom two.
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