In his September 3, 2011 NY times OpEd, The Limping Middle Class, Robert Reich continues to make a now-familiar argument that only John and Jane Doe can prop up our floundering economy.
 

When so much income goes to the top, the middle class doesn’t have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going without sinking ever more deeply into debt — which, as we’ve seen, ends badly. An economy so dependent on the spending of a few is also prone to great booms and busts. The rich splurge and speculate when their savings are doing well. But when the values of their assets tumble, they pull back. That can lead to wild gyrations. Sound familiar?

The economy won’t really bounce back until America’s surge toward inequality is reversed. Even if by some miracle President Obama gets support for a second big stimulus while Ben S. Bernanke’s Fed keeps interest rates near zero, neither will do the trick without a middle class capable of spending. Pump-priming works only when a well contains enough water.

Reich blames a resurgent oligarchy for grabbing too much of a shrinking pie, but warns:
 

Yet the rich are now being bitten by their own success. Those at the top would be better off with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy than a large share of one that’s almost dead in the water.

The economy cannot possibly get out of its current doldrums without a strategy to revive the purchasing power of America’s vast middle class.

Way back in 2009, I posted Peak Middle Class on TPM:
 

One of my high school history textbooks went to great lengths to shoot down communism as it was explaining it. The authors cited a large middle class, such as in the US, as a bulwark against the class struggle predicted by Marx and Engels. I guess that argument stuck with me, and over the years I have tended to find comfort in our prosperous middle class as a stabilizing influence in our political culture.

But the middle class comes with a hefty environmental price tag.

If you listen to Julian Darley, Richard Heinberg or any of many academic doomsayers, it is the large, comfortable middle classes of the developed world and the growing middle classes in Asia that are the primary culprits in both energy depletion and climate change. Not the rich, because there aren't enough of them to make a difference, not the teeming millions of poor because they don't individually own or consume all that much, but the middle class with their long SUV commutes to large, exurban houses stocked with globally manufactured possessions.

And the middle classes are themselves an economic burden.

If you believe Sharon Astyk, the middle class bears on a substantial economic foundation of newly-industrialized third world workers. Some of the middle class live off the rich or other middle class workers, but by and large it is the huge numbers of new buyers at the bottom that raise the pyramid of wealth for everyone. If enough of those workers lose their jobs, return to subsistence agriculture, or fall prey to some political disaster, there will be fewer customers to support the global middle class.

So the paradox is that a large middle class is a contented, reliable population for a nation, but a danger to the entire planet's health and prosperity. Even more than general population reduction, I expect to see a reduction in middle class populations worldwide.

Will the future be a grim exercise in Dickensian class struggle, as those who have struggle to keep from joining those who no longer have? Or will people manage to be happy with less?

I'd forgotten I wrote that, and was almost going to write it again when I googled Darley and ran across it reblogged at Energy Bulletin. There were some good comments in response, and some good comments to my dag post Wither the Middle Class about Michael Blim's argument that the middle class was the engine of Liberalism.

America looks even more Dickensian to me now than it did just over two years ago. So once again, I wonder if there is a future for the big-spending American middle class, and the growth economy that Reich expects it to support - without plentiful fossil fuels. Even if we find more energy, even if we dig up all the tar sands and frack out all the natural gas, can a semblance of our traditional middle class survive the resulting environmental damage and climate change?

We need a new class in the middle - less devoted to emulating the rich, or stimulating the economy, and more interested in preserving the planet - but creating such a class will be difficult in the face of increasing advertising and diminishing education.