One of the most surprising recent additions to the American political bedrock is the $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. Only a few years ago derided as a deranged notion of socialist radicals, the campaign for a $15 hourly has assumed outsized, totemic stature across parties, a proxy for a right to a bare, dignified existence.

But while the proposed wage, twice the 12-year-old current federal minimum, has been a boon to many bottom-of-the-rung workers already receiving it at Amazon, Walmart and elsewhere, there is a big thing it is not: A ticket to the middle class.

Yet both major parties, driven by an unusual convergence of thinking about how to win future national elections, seem likely to gravitate to a debate on what does constitute a middle-class wage. If historical precedent is a guide, the new talk seems likely to revolve around more or less $40 an hour.

The new zeitgeist, in other words, appears likely to be more intentional, truly middle-class wages.
That is the theme of this new blog: a conversation leapfrogging over the current buzz, and turning to what may be the next idea of the moment. We are at the onset of a dramatic new decade, coming off a once-in-a-century pandemic and a similarly rare economic downturn, an apparent point of departure that is hard to credibly parse, involving far too much stimulus to easily process. At a still-to-be-determined frequency, we will surface and wrestle with a single bold idea in big science, politics, economics, technology, society, geopolitics — whatever. I invite your own stab at the next zeitgeists. I hope you will invite your friends, co-workers and family to follow and participate, too.

There are reasons apart from politics why the debate around wages will evolve: In an April 8 report, American intelligence agencies identified a primary, long-term security risk: the country’s tribal fragmentation into red, blue, Black, Asian-American, white and other groupings. That dynamic is not new — for three decades and longer, scholars have documented Americans “Coming Apart,” “Bowling Alone,” and otherwise withdrawing into protected, self-contained clusters. Algorithms have done the rest to vacuum-seal these assemblages into impermeable bubbles. But underlying this American turtling has also been a shrinkage of the population’s material health, a primary well-spring of the willingness to be generous, open and tolerant: In 1971, about 61% of Americans lived in middle-class households, according to a study by Pew. As of two years ago, the number had contracted to 51%. “In many senses the rise of populism around the world is about the decline of well-paid, nasty jobs,” said David Blanchflower, an economics professor at Dartmouth and author of “Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?” “Many were union coal, steel, car plants, etc. But they carried with them pensions and security and hope especially for those without college degrees.”

In Amy Goldstein’s 2017 book Janesville, the story of the shuttering of a major General Motors plant in a Wisconsin company town, we witness the primordial shock of falling out of the middle class.

It is the story of a collapse of lifestyle, the loss of a world, a challenge to a culture and belief system, a trigger of profound distrust, and the urge to pull around the protective wagons.

In part, the $15 an hour wage is meant to put a floor underneath Janesville-like descents. If a warehouse is paying $11 an hour, $4 is a 36% jump. But it’s a false life preserver: Even $15 an hour means $600 a week before taxes, and $31,200 a year full time. Unless you’re a student living at home with your parents, $15 is a stretch in much of the country if you are covering rent, utilities, and food. “I don’t think you can build a middle class or have an American dream that means anything with $15 an hour today,” Daron Acemoglu, a leading economist at MIT, told me.

“A post-Dickensian minimum wage law is not going to rebuild middle class jobs,” said David Autor, an MIT economist. “It will simply make terrible jobs slightly less terrible.”

I grew up in 1970s southern California, in the suburb of Thousand Oaks, where throughout my childhood the main industry seemed to be home-building. The fathers of my friends included carpenters, roofers, drywall and insulation installers, and plumbers. We lived in a sprawl of large and small single-family homes. I don’t recall families going on luxurious holidays, though everyone seemed to lavish money on cars and pickups, Levi’s, beer and barbeques. I looked up what these men were earning, data tracked by the St. Louis Fed: In 1970, it was an average of $6.60 an hour, or $45.06 in 2021 dollars, equivalent to $93,700 a year, not counting overtime. Hence my childhood memory of a solidly middle-class place.

This picture of America was not an aberration: In 1955, the average American journeyman construction worker earned $3.30 an hour, or $32.62 in current dollars. By 1960, that wage was up to $36.69, and, if you were living in Chicago in 1967, $46.39 an hour. In 1979, just before Ronald Reagan came to power, crushed the Air Traffic Controllers and signaled the decline of unions, building trades were paying $43.09 an hour in 2021 dollars, and $54.23 including employer retirement and other benefits. As of last year, journeymen union carpenters earned about $36 an hour, still respectable pay adding up to almost $75,000 a year before overtime. But much carpentry work now is non-union, which pays around $26.

Carl Frey, director of the Future of Work program at Oxford University and author of “The Technology Trap,” told me that the housing boom ultimately provided so many jobs that it masked over the eventful plunge of employment in American manufacturing. Here is where we get some comprehension of what it means when economists speak of “growing inequality.” What’s happened, according to Pew, is that, in the period I’m talking about — from 1970 to 2018 or so — the share of income earned by upper-income households soared to 48% from 29%. That rise came almost entirely at the expense of middle-income households, whose share fell from 62% to 43% of the total. Lower-income people dropped just a tad, from 10% to 9%. When economists and politicians talk about the bulk of new wealth flowing to the top, that’s partly what they mean.

Itwon’t be possible to create a $40 federal minimum wage anytime soon— most small businesses won’t be able to afford it. But such a floor could be deliberately built under the wages of some jobs — the jobs of the future.
Cognizant, the consulting firm, produces a Jobs of the Future Index, a tool that tracks 50 real and projected occupations of the coming months and years, based on technological and demographic trends. In the first quarter of this year, jobs from the index posted by companies grew 29% from the prior quarter, 10 percentage points higher than the Burning Glass All Jobs Index, Cognizant reported yesterday. Of those, pure tech job postings saw an unsurprising surge: the number of robotics engineering jobs rose 73%, and data scientists by 42%. But the sharpest increase was for the occupation of caregiver/personal care assistant, which saw a 249.5% rise. The job of family behavioral therapist had a 25% rise, and urban transportation planners were up 42%.

Cognizant does not track wages, but when you are in demand, you can command higher pay. What would be unreasonable, from a worker’s perspective, would be a race to the bottom in which companies sought to pay $15 or $20 an hour for the futuristic occupations. A traditional job that Cognizant tracks is that of elder caregiver. Until today, U.S. states have tended to heavily underpay such workers — nurses and attendants caring for the fast-aging population. In the future, when they are increasingly demanded, their pay could — and should — rise sharply. Ben Pring, director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work and co-author of the new book “Monster,” told me that all or most of the occupations he tracks will earn $40 or above.

Consider also the current mania over electric vehicles: EVs have not yet reached mainstream motorists, but sticker prices are dropping and automakers are planning for a buying boom starting in the middle of the decade. Ahead of this, Tesla, Volkswagen, General Motors, Ford and other companies are building out EV charging infrastructure.

That has created the need for a new skill: charging station repair.

ChargerHelp, a Los Angeles company started by co-founders Kameale Terry and Evette Ellis, is among the players in this fresh space. When charging stations fail, Terry told me when we met virtually back in January, it’s usually about software. Therefore, she and Ellis skipped over what otherwise would seem to be the most apt workers available — electricians — and created a job manual to train up their own work force. With that in motion, Ellis began lobbying the Labor Department to give the technicians an official “O*NET code” designation. Finally, an initial crew of workers was trained, and the federal designation was approved with the name “electric vehicle charging station technician.”

But how much to pay an EV charging station technician? Terry and Evette basically chose a number out of thin air — $39 an hour, or $80,000 a year full-time. At least for now, EV charging station technicians will be a new part of the middle class.

American politicians have not been blind to the difference between low- and middle-income employment. The subject of “good-paying jobs” arises frequently, if not almost daily. Rarer is anyone getting specific.

But, for base political reasons, that seems likely to change: In both political parties, there is a push to win the allegiance of the working class, who, with their votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, have helped to decide the last two presidential elections. With the country so closely divided, these states are likely to remain the determining, seismic edge of politics for some time. Therefore, the competition to help the struggling part of their population in very concrete, financial ways to climb back into the middle class seems likely to remain extremely intense, and to become far more deliberate: Politicians will be called upon for specific proposals to revive middle-income work, the kind represented by the $40-an-hour wage.

“There is an issue that jobs that once supported a family in the middle class no longer do. We shouldn’t be under any illusion that raising the minimum wage, or providing a wage subsidy, etc. will address that issue,” said Oren Cass, executive director of American Compass, a conservative think tank, and domestic policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “The only way for the nation to have a thriving middle class is for the economy to generate the jobs that will support one.”