If it only takes 11% as many hours of work to pay for a refrigerator as it did in 1949, are middle class families better off?

"Yes," says University of Michigan economics professor, Mark J. Perry, who found an old Sears catalog, and seeming to agree is this post, Consumers Never Had It So Good, by the New York Times website economics editor, Catherine Rampell.

"No," says Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law School insolvency expert (and chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the implementation of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act). In a 50 minute lecture in this video with slides, The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class, she documents the middle class predicament, cheaper consumer products notwithstanding. (I tried a few months ago to find a transcript, but failed. Sorry, fellow troglodytes.)

In comments to the Rampell post, robertdfeinman summarizes the Warren lecture:

The essential point is that the proportion of funds spent on necessities has shifted so that household goods are a declining portion of the budget, but the ability to live a decent middle class lifestyle is under threat. It also takes two people in the work force where it used to take only one.

We now have to pay our own health care, retirement, higher education, etc where before much of this was provided by employers.

Education through high school, the typical terminal degree was free. Now students have to finance their remaining education themselves. There are other examples as well.

It's 45 minutes long, but she managed to get some interesting data from the census bureau and seeing it presented is worth the time watching.