English

The Middle Class Goes Global

Feb 21, 2012 Johannes Jütting

We are moving at high speed toward a world based on a new geography of growth, with millions of people in the east and the south moving out of extreme poverty to become powerful middle-class consumers. Will their dreams be achieved, or will governments’ failure to provide adequate social protection and services lead to a global nightmare?

PARIS – In the twentieth century, the American dream of a middle-class life inspired the world. Now, in the twenty-first, we are moving at high speed toward a world based on a new geography of growth, with millions of people in the east and the south moving out of extreme poverty to become potentially powerful middle-class consumers. Whether the dreams of this new global middle-class are realized or turn into a nightmare depends on several factors.

In today’s shifting world, with GDP in roughly 80 developing economies rising at twice the rate of per capita growth in the OECD, the club of the world’s richest countries, middle-class citizens paradoxically complain and protest regardless of whether fortunes improve or decline. Moises Naim, a former Venezuelan minister of trade and industry, even warns of a possible “emerging global war of the middle-classes.”

While anger over pay cuts and unemployment make sense, it is harder to understand the current protests in fast-growing countries like Thailand and Chile, where standards of living are improving. What is going on?

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JSC Siow Feb 22, 2012

There's an inherent contradiction here where you state the need for better jobs (presumably requiring a better qualified workforce) and yet in your subsequent statement claim that: "Education in the developing world must be reformed to cater to the demand for skills." Where better jobs are not forthcoming, doesn't the lack of demand for well-qualified labor create a vicious cycle if education policies follow suit? Your latter seems to be calling for a race to the bottom (education-wise) or to some kind of lowest common denominator - or am I mistaken?
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Zsolt Hermann Feb 22, 2012

What we see is a very fundamental reaction of our basic matter: desire.

Imagine a very fine tasteful cake, but before we actually tasted it we do not truly crave for it. After we got a taste and then the cake is taken away, this is when the true desire, hunger to eat the cake appears.

The middle class world wide, especially in emerging market countries is relatively new, even in western societies only some decades old. For this short time they could taste the good, comfortable life, security, prosperity, they could buy all those goods made desired in their eyes by the skillful margeting machinery. Of course it was all false, an illusion, since this good life was based on not on their own money but on credit beyond their natural necessities and means, making them slaves to the banks and the establishment.

Today the good life is taken away, they lose their jobs, houses, money, and most of all lose their future prospects. And at the moment it is only starting but as the crisis is going on it will get worse. These people will want the good life they tasted, they are not the poor social layers who never tasted comfortable secure life, these people know exactly what they want back thus they will not give it up easily.

The top layers of society do not have answers, solutions to fulfill this desire in the present worsening economical situation, especially as now they have to explain the suddenly revealed vast inequalities as well.

This will not end pretty unless the social layers start talking to each other in an honest, transparent way, and start working out together how we can adapt to this new global, interdependent, mutual network we evolved into, and create a new human structure where everybody can taste the good life in a sustained way.
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