Thomas Piketty wrote a 900-page powerpoint that pretty exhaustively proves that capitalism concentrates wealth. The conservatives dismiss his arguments out-of-hand because they're ethically bound to do so... I've yet to see a substantive counterpoint to his basic discoveries. Simply put, capitalism becomes feudalism unless you add a heapin' helpin' of socialism. Piketty's argument is to allow capitalist markets with socialist regulation.

So there's your low-wage growth, and there's your wealth concentration. It's definitely related to technology, but it's been related to technology since the Bronze Age. The middle class is an aberration of socialist thinking, really; we have to fight to keep it alive. Your argument, then, is that we aren't fighting for it.

I'm not worried, believe it or not. Poor people buy commodities and commodities are low profit margin. Middle-class people buy luxuries... you don't need an iPhone, but if you make over $40k a year you can justify it. There will never be enough truly stinking rich people to support the economy, and no matter how many poor people there are, they can't support the high-profit-margin shit like designer shoes and tiramisu.

So it comes down to what makes "middle class." There's a likelihood that "middle class" makes less money 50 years from now than they did 50 years ago. Is the quality of life going to be worse, though? 1998 is calling:

I was talking with my wife last night about footie pajamas. She had them and loved them; my mother despised them so I was only grudgingly allowed to have a pair. To get them we had to look them up in the JC Penney catalog, call a 1800 number, send in a check, wait a week, then drive 60 miles to a store to pick them up. Now? Now I can have virtually every consumer product I could want at my doorstep within 48 hours. That's in my lifetime - I've gone from rotary phones to LTE Facetime in a moving car. What sort of unimaginable luxury would Skype be to someone in 1977?

Make no mistake - you will be made supernumerary. And make no mistake - you will have to compete with your peers for jobs. But the market needs buyers and sellers and market forces set prices. When mass production is cheap, craftsmanship becomes expensive and craftsmen become artisans. When labor is unnecessary, laborers become managers - imagine what a dandy the average forklift operator would be to longshoremen at the turn of the century.

Don't worry about the corporations. They can't look beyond the profits of the next couple quarters. They have a legal obligation to shareholders and a stock that doesn't produce is a stock that gets punished.

Believe it or not, the market is going to keep right on solving this one.