I'm not in the thread for the numbers...and charts and...
That why I went with 'may be true globally'. And the truth is it isn't how much one makes, it's how much compared to the people one sees around oneself.
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Unfortunately, $15k a year is way too much for most of the world economy to support on a purely capitalistic basis.
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Too much for the environment to support, or too much for capitalists to begrudge?
An article at
How capitalism's great relocation pauperised America's 'middle class' | Richard Wolff | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk proposes an interesting view of capitalism. Mac OSX Summarize Text picks this as the central paragraph.
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Workers' struggles eventually forced capitalists to pay rising wages, enabling higher living standards for large sections of the working classes (so-called "middle classes"). Capitalists and their economist spokespersons later rewrote that history to suggest instead that rising wages were blessings intrinsic to the capitalist system. How wrong that was, as I describe below.
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Personally I'd go with
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Capitalism is now reconfiguring centers and their hinterlands on a truly global scale. The US increasingly approaches the formerly "third world" pattern of a few centers surrounded by vast layers of more or less desperate hinterland dwellers. In the language of US politics, its "middle class" disappears.
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Sounds like 'as above' (global) 'so below' (the US). In any case the article frames the question as:
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Can capitalism achieve the social acceptance in the new centers that its first 200 years found in the old centers?
Even if it can, the working classes in the old centers may soon withdraw their traditional acceptance.
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