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Karl Marx and Why Societies Stop Growing
The Material Roots Behind the Hollowing of The Middle Class
Every month, a teacher sees her salary arrive already reduced by the tax she owes the government. Wage earners pay as they earn. Her employer withholds it and hands it over before she has touched a penny, so the number that lands in her account is the smaller one. Somewhere not far away, a man sitting on a fortune goes years without paying meaningful income tax, and none of it breaks the law.
These have been extraordinary years for making money, and lately the pace has become hard to describe without sounding hysterical.
Forbes counted the ten richest people gaining 730 billion dollars between them over the course of 2025. On one morning that September, Oracle posted an earnings forecast, the shares jumped 38 percent, and Larry Ellison’s net worth rose by around a 100 billion dollars before lunch. It was the largest single-day gain ever recorded.
A teacher on 60 thousand a year would need roughly 1.5 million years to earn it, which is to say she would have needed to start in the Pleistocene, when our species was still working out fire.
And in the same decades the things an ordinary family used to assume, a house, a pension, a fair bet the children would do at least as well…
