And the reason for the death of the middle class is regulation that was purportedly to help reduce inequality, like all manner of taxes. I think the solution is obviously to keep trying. That's not the definition of insanity, that's good old fashioned human stupidity, and unlike AI stupidity, human stupidity gets reset back to 100% with every generation. No wonder history repeats itself.

Actually, median is exactly what you want. It strips out outliers. It's the "middle of the pack" person. Mean is the one that would be skewed by outliers.

And "the poor are getting poorer" is simply untrue for the last 10 years. They had a pretty bad time from 1980 - 2015, but in the last 10 years, their real income has risen faster than any other quintile: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/growth-in-real-wages-over-t...

No, the poor are also getting richer: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLB50107

You're looking at what percent of the total wealth pie do the poor get. But the pie itself is growing, and so is _everyones_ slice of the pie.

Maybe you think its an inherent problem that some people get a bigger percent of the pie than others. But its objectively untrue to say that the poor are getting poorer.