We first moved to the US in 1981. For me, a lot of the country already seemed like that back then.

Cars with '50s technology. Same for washing machines. Crumbling infrastructure, people (usually dark-skinned) doing jobs that had been automated since before I was born. Windows that didn't close properly.

And yes, on the other hand incredible wealth. I went to a private school with people that never had, and probably never would, have any idea of how "The Rest of Us" live. Father: doctor or lawyer. Kid goes to private school, then on to an elite college (if grades aren't quite up to par, daddy has to buy a library). Graduate, prestigious law firm, house in the same sort of suburb they grew up in. At 13, they had their life mapped out, and a comfortable life it was.

I had never seen these sorts of divides in my native country. Different social classes live much closer together, go to the same schools and to the same universities, they don't live in totally separate spheres.

And still the influence of 'government is the problem' is alive and well in my home country, the Netherlands. We are in no way in a state like the US, and still the largest political party wants to cut taxes and decrease government influence. Despite all the evidence contrary.

For me, someone interested in politics, this is pretty obvious. Every european reporter that covers US politics talks about this divide: rich vs poor.

I do agree with other posters here that the article doesn't back up any claims with evidence, but I guess that's in the book. The author seems credible, to say the least.

> We’ve been digging ourselves into a hole for over forty years, but Temin says that we know how to stop digging. If we spent more on domestic rather than military activities, then the middle class would not vanish as quickly. The effects of technological change and globalization could be altered by political actions. We could restore and expand education, shifting resources from policies like mass incarceration to improving the human and social capital of all Americans. We could upgrade infrastructure, forgive mortgage and educational debt in the low-wage sector, reject the notion that private entities should replace democratic government in directing society, and focus on embracing an integrated American population. We could tax not only the income of the rich, but also their capital.

That paragraph alone shows how heavily political this article is. It's just the basic, typical left-wing program. I'm not visiting HN to see this kind of crap.

I understand that this is just a summary of a book, but I have no takeaways after skimming this, as there was not one statistic or graph in the article. I love a good argument backed by statistics, and maybe the book has it... the article certainly didn't.

College doesn't work very often anymore. There are plenty of Comp Sci programs at US universities where half or more graduates can't get FTE jobs. We're so tired of seeing education being touted as a solution as underemployment continues to skyrocket because the new structural reality of the economy is that human bodies are being considered the most costly expense to be excised.

It ought to be FS (Finance & Software) instead of FTE. The TE (Technology & Electronics) isn't a growth sector. Seems most hardware is overseas, unless one assumes growth in automation, but again that's mostly software.

The SM in STEM doesn't pay, unless M is in Finance. Don't know why he would specifically call out Electronics unless he naively thinks that is software.

I think that everybody have to understand that USA is very big country and it's extremely diverse, much more than countries in Europe. USA seems to have spots of extreme wealthy like Silicon Valley and most of the West Coast and extreme poverty like Detroit. With very small (in comparison to European countries) support for people in needs it's very easy to fall under poverty line only because of some accident.