The waning of the middle class / O outono da classe média

Parafraseando Huizinga sobre a crise da Idade Média e o mito  do American Way of Life nas histórias de Horatio Alger, Jr., apetece-me dizer que, 'From rags to riches' has become a fairy-tale.

Ficam aqui algumas citações do artigo do Financial Times (cuja leitura integral recomendo) que deixa prever os perigos da "dessocialização" dos Estados europeus. Embora o Estado Social não seja perfeito, ainda permite algumas "almofadas" de segurança (perdão pelo anglicismo) a quem tem o azar de se ver perante um problema de saúde, divórcio ou de desemprego temporário. Algo que na América está a começar a fazer sentido para um número cada vez maior de pessoas. Mas, como em tudo, parece que gostamos de copiar os sistemas e as ideias dos outros depois de se ver que estes falharam. Má sina esta!

Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French chronicler of early America, was once misquoted as having said: “America is the best country in the world to be poor.” That is no longer the case. (...) To invert the classic Horatio Alger stories, in today’s America if you are born in rags, you are likelier to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe. (...)

Larry Katz, who offers the most compelling analogy. “Think of the American economy as a large apartment block,” says the softly spoken professor. “A century ago – even 30 years ago – it was the object of envy. But in the last generation its character has changed. The penthouses at the top keep getting larger and larger. The apartments in the middle are feeling more and more squeezed and the basement has flooded. To round it off, the elevator is no longer working. That broken elevator is what gets people down the most.” (...)

E quanto às causas? O artigo também apresenta algumas, entre o óbvio e o mais do que óbvio:

Many on the left blame the Great ­Stagnation on globalisation. The rise of China, India, Brazil and others has undercut wages in the west and put America’s unskilled, semi-skilled and even skilled workers out of jobs. (...) Think of the typical Detroit car worker 30 years ago, who had a secure middle-class lifestyle, good healthcare and a fat ­pension to look forward to. Today, he lives in Shenzhen.

Another group singles out the explosion of new technology, which has enabled the most routine and easily automated jobs to be replaced by computers. (...)
Then there are those, such as Paul Krugman (...) who blame it on politics, notably the conservative backlash which began when Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980, and which sped up the decline of unions and reversed the most progressive features of the US tax system.
Fewer than a tenth of American private sector workers now belong to a union. People in Europe and Canada are subjected to the same forces of globalisation and technology. But they belong to unions in larger numbers and their healthcare is publicly funded. More than half of household bankruptcies in the US are caused by a serious ­illness or accident.

Para ler aqui, com retratos reais da América, que começam a tornar-se frequentes numa Europa em crise de solidariedade: The crisis of middle-class America - Financial Times

Interessante é também verificar como, cada vez mais, se torna difícil aos americanos pagar os estudos superiores. Algo que o artigo também refere e que deixa claro que privatização não implica melhor serviço mas sim redução no número de utilizadores. Seja na educação ou na saúde.

E cartoons como este poderão começar a tornar-se familiares por estas paragens.

                                                                           Aqui