I haven't read that one in a long time.

It's Fussell being humorous, at least in terms of style. His more serious books, "Wartime", and his famous essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb", have little humor. Fussell was one of the ground troops already in the staging process for the land invasion of Japan, so he's entitled to an opinion on the atomic bombing.

This modernized review of the 1983 book isn't that helpful. That book is a period piece. A more modern book in this genre is "Nickeled and dimed" (1996). That's dated, too, but more recent.

- Top out of sight people are more visible than they used to be.

- Many "middle class" jobs have experienced a "class fall". Teachers, for example, have moved own from middle class to unionized high prole.

- There are fewer unionized high proles. In the 1950 to the 1970s, about a quarter of the US workforce was unionized, and those were the core of the high proles, with good job security, pay, and benefits. They're mostly gone.

- Near the bottom, we have the "precariat": gig workers and people who get laid off a lot.

- The bottom is now the homeless. US homelessness was rare until the 1980s; there were enough crap jobs to go around, and housing was less expensive as a fraction of income. There were more slums, and from the 1960s on, welfare was more generous. Also, drugs were less of a factor; alcohol was bigger.

Class calculator, from Pew: [1]

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/16/are-you-i...