This erosion of a self-employed, independent middle class was an important pre-condition for the collapse of Rome and the French Revolution. I have devoted many blog posts to the erosion of the middle class, for the specific reason that when the middle class–the layers of the economy between the Power Elites and landless laborers/state dependents–erodes away, the nation/empire is destabilized and descends into crisis. A society without a functioning middle layer of economic and social activity is not stable, though repression can mask this for a time. As historian Peter Turchin explained in his book War and Peace and War: … Continue reading What’s Killing the Middle Class?