The Middle Class Was a Fluke

Was the postwar middle class a natural endpoint of development—or a contingent bargaining equilibrium? This episode asks whether broad prosperity expanded partly because states and firms depended heavily on mass participation as soldiers, workers, and consumers, and what happens when that dependence weakens.

Its strongest contribution is a testable bargaining-power question: who needs whom, for what, and how do technology, globalization, professional militaries, mobile capital, and political institutions change that leverage?

The episode compresses a large and contested history. It does not establish war as the primary cause of equality, coordinated elite intent, or a deterministic future under automation. Those claims require comparative historical research and counterexamples. Sources were curated by Alex; dialogue audio was generated with NotebookLM.