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Comment by wfo | Hacker News Reader

Scientific studies are not about you and your personal experiences. They are not about any one person. They are about trying to understand trends, general phenomena, and how humans tend to act under a variety of circumstances. You're an outlier, great. We get that you resent everyone who hasn't managed to pull themselves out of poverty but that's not what this article is about.

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How does this compare with the 1800s, where tens of millions of people who arrived with nothing but a suitcase managed to move up into the middle class?

You may want to do more than zero research into how the middle class was created before joining this discussion.

Hint: start with WW2

If you did more that 1 second of research, you'd know the history of the middle class in the US starts in the early 1800s with the growth of manufacturing, not WWII. WWII was a huge boost for various reasons (women in the workforce, GI Bill), but it doesn't negate the parents point about the immigrants of the previous century.

Start a bit earlier: with FDR and The New Deal.

The persistence of this myth is truly remarkable. Consider that Veblen published "The Theory of the Leisure Class" in 1899. What we consider today the middle class was very much alive and booming by the end of the 19th century.

Is it alive and booming today?

We did also get some hundreds of thousands of immigrants (boat people) in the 1980s, I think mostly without suitcases. My impression (casual) is they have done fairly well.

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