America is regressing into a developing nation for most people

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.

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.

Are you perchance in a situation where you don't plainly see the dual economy right in front of your face when you go outside? I'm about as skeptical as they come, but not as much about things I can watch happen with my own eyes. Or was there something more specific in the article that seemed dubious?

I'd encourage people not to let HN's ridiculous faux-scientific culture enable you to persist in denial about how around 100 million people in the US live.

> 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.

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.