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Posts tagged with middle class

by Rachel Johnson, Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center Microsimulation Model Reading about the early meanings of the phrase “middle class” it clearly refers to: …someone with so much capital that they could rival nobles….. professionals, managers, and senior civil servants. and not to “the broad shoulders” holding up society, which should properly be called “the working class”. In other words, not “normal” or “typical” people at all (typical being $21k/year)—the “middle class” could accurately refer in the U.S. only to those making over $100k/year. I.e., “possessing significant human capital” which allows them not to just have a job at a successful corporation and be a line-item on that corporation’s budget, but to extract significant wages from the economy.

by Rachel Johnson, Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center Microsimulation Model

Reading about the early meanings of the phrase “middle class” it clearly refers to:

…someone with so much capital that they could rival nobles….. professionals, managers, and senior civil servants.

and not to “the broad shoulders” holding up society, which should properly be called “the working class”.

In other words, not “normal” or “typical” people at all (typical being $21k/year)—the “middle class” could accurately refer in the U.S. only to those making over $100k/year. I.e., “possessing significant human capital” which allows them not to just have a job at a successful corporation and be a line-item on that corporation’s budget, but to extract significant wages from the economy.

(Source: The New York Times)


hi-res




Traffic Accidents in Russia

jkottke:

This video is 13 minutes of traffic accidents in Russia and totally amazing.

  1. Show this to your teenagers before they take the wheel. If it doesn’t scare the p*ss out of them—or even worse, if it excites them—no more Grand Theft Auto and hide the car keys.
  2. Next time you complain about public services, boring orderliness and “safety first”, the desireability of risk, Panglossian everything-optimal economics, or forget how relatively safe you are on your German freeways, …. watch this.

    As someone else remarked (can’t remember the source), the difference between Somalia and the USA is the stuff everybody in the US completely forgets is even possible.
  3. Notice how many of the accidents are caused by people trying to zoom ahead of everyone else—off the side of the road, cutting down a tree without noticing it will land on somebody else, trying to pass on the left or on the right or across the lane. Is your time really that important relative to everyone else’s, people?
  4. Assumptions. You think you can make assumptions, like that someone won’t fell a tree on your head, or a military jet won’t fly over your head, that someone won’t spill military equipment near you, or that people from the other lane (or off the road) won’t drive completely orthogonal and attack your car. Sometimes those assumptions are wrong.
  5. How many of these people do you think actually accepted the blame on themselves for their reckless actions?

via @Alea_, @felixsalmon