A subject that has not been much discussed, however, is the fall in the standard of living of the middle class between generations. A doctor, a teacher, a lawyer, an engineer, not only found work easily, but they didn’t have to work to death to maintain a house. And the very meaning of “keeping a house” is becoming more and more modest. In the generation born until the 1940s, “keeping a house” meant keeping a housewife and children. In the Brazilian upper middle class, it certainly included a domestic worker.
With the massive entry of middle-class women into the labor market, “keeping a house” became something of a vaguer meaning. Maybe we can translate it as “give comfort to children while father and mother cut a fold”. (It’s no wonder, then, that the generation raised by these absent parents is different from previous ones.) Today, for someone of my generation, “keeping a house” means paying the bills so you don’t get evicted from the cubicle in which you live a life. single.
Causes – degree inflation
We can point out a series of causes that contribute to this degradation. The middle class usually has a large number of graduates in its composition. The degradation of the value of degrees has to have a negative impact on the middle class, therefore. And this leads to the PT propaganda, according to which the middle class hates the poor, and only with the grace of São Lula did the poor man’s son become a doctor. The ad doesn’t mention that the poor guy now has an unemployed doctor son, but that’s okay. It is worth remembering the PT propaganda because it omits that the main vector for the expansion of diplomas was not the multiplication of federal universities, but the transfer of tax money from Brazilians to private education.
Now I ask the reader to remember what private universities were like before the PT era. The students knew the college’s owners, who were flesh and blood people who lived in the same city. These faculties were all bought up by large foreign conglomerates. Today the private college in your city may even have the same name on the facade, but below the old logo it will have a name like “DeVry” or “Adtalem”.
I focused on DeVry because I had Salvador in mind. . The portion of private faculties that existed in the Center were gaining the same name below. If before there were a lot of owners nearby, now everything was centralized in the hands of distant investors. But I’m out of date as I see that DeVry, Inc has changed its name to “Adtalem Global Education”. You can click on their official website and, if you know English, you will see that they celebrate new acquisitions of universities around the world and announce that the company’s shares are falling. (It’s not negative propaganda, it’s propaganda for you to buy.) In the Sustainability tab, you will see that it is all aligned with the ESG, that is, with the lacrador capitalism.
The PT took money from the small and medium Brazilian businessmen and placed it in the hands of foreign monopolists. At the same time, it flooded the job market with diplomas that were worthless and destroyed the federal ones with Reuni (of which I have spoken on so many other occasions). As much as we dislike the feds today, the reader will remember that this reputation for the feds dates back to the PT era. Before, however flawed it may have been, public higher education served as a quality parameter. This reference was for the cucuias.
Causes – general tendency to concentrate in monopolies
The middle class is, as the name says, in the middle. Above are the rich and below are the poor. Therefore, if those at the top grow too much, the natural consequence is the flattening of the middle class.
The pandemic has deepened this. The São Paulo merchant was forced to close his stores, but people still need to buy. Where will they buy? On Amazon. At Magazine Luiza. In a word, in the ESG gang, which is always a monopolist.
The neighborhood trader will not be able, in a jolt, to compete with the global monopolist. This one may spend a lot of time selling at a loss just to break the competition. The clientele will be happy for a while, wear a purple Livres shirt and say that (monopoly) capitalism is very good. He will defend that the State takes his tax to give to the monopolist who sells modests. On Ash Wednesday, however, the lone monopolist will drive prices up. Will it remain to rent instead of buy, perhaps?
The World Economic Forum, by Klaus Schwab, created the slogan “You will own nothing and be happy”, that is, “You will not own nothing and be happy”. nothing and you will be happy”. In this utopia, everyone will rent things, which will be delivered by a drone. Now, if they will be rented, and if the Forum is owned by entrepreneurs and not heads of state, that means that a handful of global monopolists will own it.
The pandemic was a big step in this process of income concentration whose pinnacle would be the end of the middle class. One has to wonder if the process has not been going on for a longer time. Finding out the details of this is completely beyond my remit.
Causes – duplication of non-manual labor
An easy cultural cause to intuit is the compulsory entry of middle-class women into the labor market. Among the poor, women have always worked. But there is work for men and work for women: the bricklayers and the maids stayed where they were. Not in the middle class: it doesn’t matter whether the person writing petitions, teaching chemistry or prescribing an anti-inflammatory is male or female. Work is more intellectualized and therefore indifferent to the body.
Middle-class couples began to imitate poor couples, but the effect was the opposite. It makes sense for the poor woman to go to work to increase the income of the house, since she is not a competitor of her husband. When a couple of lawyers decide that one of them should go out to work, however, what happens is the doubling of the supply of lawyers, and a firm can, at the end of the day, hire two for the price of one. The couple’s work increases without increasing income. Meanwhile, there are the children. The family may be left with stagnant income and will still have to add the expense of full-time schooling or housekeeping. And then there’s guilt, which leads parents to make up for the absence by buying their kids a bunch of junk.
Indebted and unhappy, it’s no wonder that this domestic arrangement doesn’t last for more than a generation. And it’s also no wonder that the next generation, without support, lives a war of all against all, with family courts partying on top of pensions and politicians selling misandry.
Causes – more expensive housing
Going back to the beginning, “keeping a house” also designated a different physical space in the beginning. A house was really a house, not an apartment. People built houses because there was space on the streets of the metropolises for that – even in São Paulo, the capital. To build a house, you wouldn’t hire a big contractor who builds thousands of homes by yourself; you were the customer of an engineer and an architect, both middle class. Once you own your house, the fixed expense you would have to live in was called IPTU.
Today there is no more space in the metropolis to build a house. The price of the land takes into account the potential profit that a large corporation would make from there with a building. Apartment building is too expensive for a middle-class person to afford; therefore, it remains for the big ones to take the enterprise forward. The very spatial configuration of the metropolis favors the centralization of money.
Once you buy not a plot of land, but an apartment, you have to always be up to date with a variable and unpredictable rate of value in the long term condominium call. If you become unemployed, the condominium will be there to consume your reservations.
The mere fact that you have bought a ready-made apartment, and only know people who buy ready-made apartments, means that you don’t have minimal discernment about how much construction material costs. This makes him unknowingly a target for cartels. It is true that demand makes the price, but it is also true that the human mind is not that simple and mathematical, and that if it is outraged by an exorbitant profit margin, it will sizzle and seek solutions.
The high prices of a possible cartel also make it impossible to simply gather the money and buy a house. Thus, the citizen goes in search of credit – often subsidized. And behold, once again we have the transfer of public money to the pockets of monopolists.
Finally, there is the energy issue. We see Europe getting all splintered by the environmental agenda and the shutdown of nuclear power plants. If it didn’t rain, the bill goes up. Europe is, in a word, like Brazil. We have to ask ourselves, therefore, how much of the environmental agenda is not made with the simple purpose of flattening the middle class.
In the Brazilian case, there is still another important problem: cat. The government’s lack of commitment to fighting the cat only shifts the burden to the middle class. We have more natural energy sources than Europe, we should have more nuclear energy, but we cannot ignore the amount of cats in Brazilian metropolises.
Last, but not least, the very fact that there are more singles implies (if they don’t all live with their mother) an increase in the demand for housing. Thus, man and woman may have stopped living together to buy each an exorbitant cubicle.