This one has always made sense to me. If you think about circumstances which improve the bottom quintiles’ relative income so that they’re now making as much as the median (I.e. the curve flattens out through unprecedented prosperity for the poorest) then the middle and upper middle incomes will rightly conclude that they’re not relatively high income anymore.

Placing an arbitrary person on the curve at the right place will show their relative position on this.

There’s a reason a large amount of the complaints are things like “my DoorDash is so much more expensive” and “my insta cart bill is so much higher”.

In the ideal state for the text writing middle and upper middle class, the mostly video consuming lower classes make very little money and provide services for cheap.

One should expect that enriching the poor upsets those whose relative wealth/income is no longer as high as it used to be. I imagine we could test this by comparing p75, p90 to p10 and p50

For my part I am optimistic. So many things today are so much cheaper and better than they used to be. Looking forward to the future - with the one caveat that AI is the precipitous ridge we must walk.