At the start of the 1970s, homeowners—often in single-earner families—generally spent two-and-a-half years’ worth of their income when they bought a house. That number began to rise and rise. By 2010, it had nearly doubled. Buying a house now took almost four-and-a-half years of a family’s earnings. People could sense the deteriorating relative position of the working class even before it showed up in the statistics. Wealth was being more openly signaled, and consumers were warned that they were being sorted and tiered. A smugness that had been alien to American culture made a triumphant
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