Third Way Dispatch

The middle class is anxious.

Despite reams of good economic news from Wall Street, there’s an underlying anxiety that belies the objective numbers of low unemployment, low inflation, rising stock prices and job growth.

Many progressives are responding to this anxiety by jumping on the bandwagon of what we call “neopopulism.” They interpret this anxiety as a sign of genuine crisis and decline for both the middle class and our nation – a situation that demands economic policies that look inward and backward.

We think this response completely misdiagnoses the real source of middle class anxiety. The middle class is anxious, but it is not in crisis. And they are not anxious because they are disenchanted with the American system. They are anxious because of the new rules that define the path to economic success in the new economy and the failures of government to help the middle class navigate this new path.

We have just released a report, The New Rules Economy, that defines nine ways in which the rules for economic success have changed and what government can do to effectively address middle-class anxiety.

In this report, we also take a hard look at the real state of the middle class. We believe a critical piece of designing effective solutions for the middle class is to see the middle class as it truly is, not as how it is perceived to be. You may find some surprises in our numbers, which in turn have tremendous implications for what the right policies for the middle class should be.