You can extrapolate from the article and your comment into the future: in the future few things that we base our current economy on will still have value.

This means that we're going to have to radically re-think how compensation should work and how our future economy is supposed to work given that almost any job can be automated to some extent. The 'automated away' segment is expanding both upward and downward, that 'middle class' that is disappearing is not so much a middle-class as a middle tier, those jobs that were easiest to automate away because they dealt mostly with information management.

But once you go down that road your interfaces 'up' and 'down' just become 'more complex brains' and 'more capable hands' which in turn are touched by artificial intelligence and better robotics. So that middle tier will get ever wider.

This is an extremely challenging problem.

> in the future few things that we base our current economy on will still have value

"People" in general is one of those things. We have reached, or are about to reach, the point where it's no longer true that more people = more {wealth, power, progress}.

The big difference is that in much of Western Europe, the combination of social security, healthcare, pensions, social housing, eduction costs, public transport etcetera means you don't rapidly fall out of the middle class even if you lose your job.

As a result, there's much less talk about the "decline of the middle class" in Europe. There has been no dramatic change.

Thus the greater likelihood of violent revolution, or violent suppression thereof in the United States.

Given what happened with Occupy the suppression part is well under way.

The head of the NYPD said he needed to be able to deploy a 150 strong unit with machine guns to deal with protests yesterday.

http://nypost.com/2015/01/30/nypd-to-launch-a-beefed-up-coun...

350.

> The big difference is that in much of Western Europe, the combination of social security, healthcare, pensions, social housing, eduction costs, public transport etcetera means you don't rapidly fall out of the middle class even if you lose your job.

All those things depend heavily on a solid government budget, with solid income from taxing a strong economy. As we're now seeing with Greece, they're not sustainable if the government "coffers" are emptying up or if the economy is weakening.

> Sadly, I have no idea, what can be done about that.

Make way to increase the mass of higher education. Diversify education, lower standards and increase the number of graduates, and increase or create new highest standards. Make education less monolithic.

To put it more simply, just increase the number of students. Expect to have students as old as 30. Diversify the means people educate themselves, it can also happen inside of a company, it doesn't necessarily have to happen in a school. Many people can learn by themselves if they're encouraged to do so. Education doesn't have to be expensive. Maybe regulating education to have more competition between schools might be an idea ?

Education is long term, but I don't see any other way. That's how society gets better. It's either that or more talks about basic income or more taxes on the 1% or the 0.1%.

I think this will actually have the opposite effect that you're looking for. If you dramatically increase the supply of educated workers, the financial returns of getting that education go way down, for each individual worker. It may be a good thing for society and help us achieve a lot more collectively, but it's not a good thing for the worker. You'll end up with all the wealth pooling at the people who own the companies who employ these workers - much like now, but worse.

To increase wages of middle-class workers, you need to increase the demand for middle-class jobs relative to the supply of workers available. There are three main ways of doing that:

1) Increase demand. Create many more companies, which will force them to compete for talent and raise wages or be left without a labor force. YC and other accelerators have been good for that, and you see what results in San Francisco (although engineer salaries are arguably artificially depressed at the moment because companies form a cartel on wages and nobody has yet defected to try and corner the market).

2.) Decrease supply. Take some workers out of the labor force, either through converting them into employers through entrepreneurship, encouraging families, legislating a shorter work-week, or discouraging education. Note that this also will reduce output, which is a tough sell in a global world.

3.) Join multiple independent workers into one firm. This is basically what labor unions are about, surrendering your autonomy as a free economic agent so that everyone has better bargaining power.

Productivity gains, when spread across a whole class of people, never end up being captured financially by the group they most apply to. All the surplus is competed away, and the people who most benefit are the complements, those goods that everyone in the group depends upon. That's why increasing rates of college attendance - and they have been increasing, dramatically, at least in the U.S. - have resulted mostly in rising tuition and lowered wages.

> It is economically speaking rational, to automate the bulk of the (middle income) jobs, as there lie the most potential savings. So without regulation this trend will continue (it will on the other hand continue even with regulation, I believe).

Is it automation, or is it more competition from other humans? In 50 years, the population of the US almost doubled. In addition, many workers (in most countries, not just the US) now have to compete globally (indirectly, if not directly) with equivalent people from other countries with lower standards of living. Both these phenomena can have negative effects on employment and salaries, IMHO.

This is absolutely not the case. Europe and esp. Germany are 'middle-class' societies, governed by (slightly left or slightly right) middle-class parties. In contrast, the US is a plutocracy in which a broader middle class obviously makes no sense. Europe is not heading towards the US model. Parties that don't support middle-class interests have no chance in elections (esp. since the rich cannot drive elections in the same way as in the US).

I would love to have the numbers, supporting your hypothesis, as the would greatly help not only inform my pow, but that of my readers as well, as this would make a nice essay. A lot of times these last some years I read about the German middle class shrinking, mostly with people stepping down into lower income groups.

So I would gladly have numbers, supporting a different point of view, just to counter these reports.

I hope this to be true. Also I wonder how the European system has better defence agaisnt the plutocracy trend.

No two Party system, for one thing.