The Age Of Making Money Is Over. The Surprising Thing That Killed Middle-Class Wealth

How’s this for irony?

Isaiah McCall
Curated Newsletters
5 min readMay 8, 2024

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Unsplash+ In collaboration with Getty Images

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

It feels like a lifetime since I last wrote something just because I wanted to.

My creative energy lately has been spent writing for 99Bitcoins, one of the oldest crypto educational publications, and attempting to salvage an oddball Wall St. company called IBTimes as an editor.

All this work about money and I’ve stumbled upon a stark reality again — the middle class is dying. We all know it. We all feel it.

Technically speaking, “middle class” is the middle 60 percent of the income distribution. Ironically, when defined this way, the middle class cannot shrink. It can only get better or worse off — and things are getting worse:

  • American wages have remained stagnant since the 1970s, shattering the hope of a thriving economy for all.
  • US credit card debt surpassed $1T in 2023. By end 2023, it rose $100B and delinquencies increased.

Why all the credit debt? Because we want to feel rich.

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