I'm talking globally. The American middle class has done uniquely poorly during this period. (I'm not American)
Still - if you can tell me with a straight face that you'd rather be poor in the 70s vs today, I would label you crazy. It's almost impossible to account for the changing quality and abundance of goods - huge advances in medicine, computation, a plethora of high quality goods and services. Life today is qualitatively different than it was 40-50 years ago.
>You're trying to pull a fast one here. The statistic about "a billion people have been lifted out of poverty" has been greatly overblown: it's technically true, but it turns out most of those people are in China
How is that a fast one? A billion people is a billion people. If the fact that they're primarily Chinese bothers you we'll need to have a different discussion.
> "It's only class warfare when we fight back".
Who are we fighting? This is an entirely unhelpful rhetoric.
Which they are not: real wages for the bottom four quintiles have been stagnant since the seventies and the 1% have captured essentially all income gains from productivity growth since then. That is the source of the discontent.
> Over a billion people have been lifted out of poverty over the last 30 years thanks to globalization
You're trying to pull a fast one here. The statistic about "a billion people have been lifted out of poverty" has been greatly overblown: it's technically true, but it turns out most of those people are in China— if you exclude China, the number looks much less impressive. And yes, China's development is impressive, but it's a non sequitur to go from "Dirt-poor Communist country becomes richer when switching to free-market capitalism" to saying that contemporary ultra-laissez-faire economics are a good thing for developed nations.
> It just spurs on class resentment which is, if history is any guide, just about the worst way to go about things possible.
"It's only class warfare when we fight back". If, as the evidence strongly hints, the rich are leveraging their capital into political power to get more and more opportunities to stack the deck and create an unfair playing field (in a positive feedback loop), then not noticing this and subsequently demonizing them is deliberately blinding oneself to the problem and the most plausible avenues of solution.