Wealth & Money Quote by Susan George

You can hear the warning siren in George's phrasing: "erosion" is not a stumble, it's weathering. The middle class doesn't simply shrink; it gets ground down by forces that present themselves as natural, inevitable, even apolitical. That's the intent: to reframe inequality as a process with mechanics and beneficiaries, not a regrettable outcome of abstract "change."

Her second sentence tightens the screw. By calling the widening gap "always accompanied" by middle-class erosion, George rejects the comforting story that a society can sustain a healthy center while the top accelerates away. It's a direct hit on trickle-down mythology and on the bipartisan habit of treating the middle class as a vibe rather than a material condition built from wages, unions, affordable housing, and public goods. The subtext is accusatory without naming names: if this keeps happening "all over the place", then we're looking at a repeatable policy pattern, not isolated national failures.

Context matters. George emerged as a prominent critic of debt regimes, structural adjustment, and the post-1970s turn toward deregulation and privatization, when governments increasingly outsourced social stability to markets. In that landscape, "middle class" becomes less a demographic category than a political buffer: a group whose relative security dampens unrest and legitimizes the system. Erode it, and you don't just get more poverty and more wealth at the top; you get thinner solidarity, sharper resentment, and a democracy that starts to feel like customer service for asset holders. George's line works because it refuses neutrality: it insists inequality has a predictable casualty, and it's the part of society that once made mass prosperity plausible.