The Economy -- Is It Real? Was It Ever?

Let’s do a little speculating—using the mind, not the online stock broker. It’s the sort of thing done best with the TV turned off and the music down low. It involves doing the sort of thing students are most desperate to avoid in school—thinking.
In all known historical societies (and in most contemporary ones) the economic breakdown has gone pretty much as follows: a top tier of rarely more than, often not as much as, five percent which controls much of the society’s assets.
Next comes an affluent tier made up of managers, very skilled artisans, scientists, priests and bureaucrats who may live paycheck to paycheck, but do so at a relatively high level. In contemporary American terms they can afford homes up to a million dollars and drive BMWs. The Japanese have a nice term for them: “salary men”.
Below that comes a vast manufacturing/service/servant (even slave) class. They live from payday to payday, at a much lower level—in Nineteenth Century America they worked for a dollar a day, six days a week for decades. They control few if any important assets. It is from this class that Muslim extremists are able to recruit their suicide bombers.
American society reflected this three tier society quite accurately from 1776 until the 1940s, with a slowly growing affluent class—as logically followed the growth of our economy as a whole. Then, in the late ‘40s and the 1950s there was a sudden BUMP in that middle group.
Literally millions joined it. Home ownership exploded—from the 800 foot Levittown bungalows to the ever more pretentious half million and three quarter million tract homes of Las Vegas and suburban Los Angeles.
People who for millennia would have been considered as being among the lowest, semi-slave orders of society suddenly made enough money to buy four bedroom homes, two cars, a camper and a couple of snowmobiles. Everyone had at least one TV, a stereo and, by now, a computer.
We proclaimed to the world that we had invented a whole new middle class—one that everyone in society could aspire to join. A gentleman’s college degree became almost a civil right. (When I was in college, an amused medieval scholar pointed out to me that in modern America, college degrees had replaced traditional medieval social distinctions.
In place of Serfs, there were the non-degreed. For Knights we had baccalaureates, for the lower levels of the nobility [Barons and Baronet’s] we had the master’s degree. For Dukes and Counts we had Doctors of Philosophy and Medicine. As soon, as you become entitled to an academic robe, with or without sleeves, you join the modern nobility. You are a Peer in this society.)
All of which gave you a ticket (in most of the last half of the Twentieth Century) to the modern equivalent of a landed estate—a guaranteed salary at a large corporation that could allow you to live better than most medieval nobility, with superb benefits and a luxurious retirement.
We proclaimed that this new and all inclusive society (in wave after wave of civil rights movements, blacks, Hispanics and women demanded their place at the table) constituted a new order of things, that it represented a permanent change in the historical order of human existance—that the new middle class was here forever.
WHAT IF THAT ASSUMPTION WAS WRONG? What if what happened in America and Europe for the fifty to seventy-five years after World War II was merely a momentary blip caused by a unique set of circumstances that could not and have not lasted?
Let’s start tomorrow by looking at the circumstances and forces that came into play in 1945. That may help us get a handle on the future.