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Who pays for the rest of the food? Middle class pays about half the taxes (bottom 50% pays pretty much nothing or less) - with the other half being paid by the rich, the proverbial 1% so to say. They get the power for their half. Middle class gets bupkis. That's something to think about if you want to properly feel like a shmuck.
The 1% don't get power; maybe the 0.01%.
Populist politics, very much including MAGA, is driven by the perception that the middle 19% (or 19.99% in your formulation) are gaining power at the expense of the bottom 80%. [The 19% is personified here by HR professionals, corporate middle managers, teachers, doctors etc.] The elite that modern right-populists are attacking pretty explicitly includes anyone with a degree from a selective university, and doesn't appear to include hereditary billionaire real estate magnates.
Attempts by the 19.99% to enlist the 80% in solidarity against the 0.01% are the least effective political appeals going. Although the 80% include a lot of idiots, I expect they are accurately recognising the boot on their necks.
The 80% need to realize the boot on their necks imposed by the 19% (or 19.99%, although I suspect in reality it's just the 19.9%) is a good thing. Get rid of it to the point where the lower classes take charge and you'll find yourself in a very bad economic recession and once you get out of it it'll become very apparent that the position of countries like the UK on the new totem pole is one where Indonesia et. al. are now going to bully you instead of the other way around. That, I suspect, will be what truly ends up breaking the lower class western mind, and I look forward to seeing the day; of course, as a neutral third party there's no reason for a lower class Indonesian to be getting paid any less than a lower class Brit, the emergence of a more just world order will lead to squeals from westerners just like the squeals of the upper class westerners back in the 18th-19th centuries when their privileges were taken away.
Oh, come on. You're a character and I enjoy your fantasizing about the destruction of lower class whites, but do not pretend to be neutral.
I meant in the sense that I'm neither a lower class Indonesian or a lower class white British man so I don't have a direct dog in the race. No reason why Amelia in the UK who has a job making and serving mediocre coffee should get paid any more than Mehmet making and serving mediocre coffee in Ankara.
One notes that it is possible to be interested in axes of identity other than class, and judging by your comment history it seems clear that you pretty clearly adhere to such interests, between a thin veneer of self-interested line-go-up markets cheerleading.
Is Indonesia as wealthy per-capita as the UK? Is the wealth of Indonesia roughly equivalent in terms of concentration within the population? That would at least potentially be two reasons why Amelia should be paid more than Mehmet.
No it's not, however this is a difference that in a perfect and efficient world should get arbitraged away, it's an imperfection that we should be working to get rid of, not for "fairness" reasons but for "efficiency" reasons.
Similarly this is something which should over time get arbitraged away as groups and populations mix, however I admit the "failure" here is less important to correct than the first one in terms of deadweight loss.
You assume that the population of the world is perfectly emulsifiable, even though in reality we see that populations also have tendencies to diversify (not even just based on ethnicity, location, etc, but even across generations, and within generations from the same ethnic group in a single location) and that placing people in close proximity often does not actually cause groups to adopt a shared culture. So the mechanism that you depend on, most likely does not actually work like you need it to work.
Furthermore, even if a single shared culture would come into existence in this way, there is absolutely no guarantee that it would result in everyone achieving the wealth of the most wealthy nations, or even the average of existing nations. So the "imperfection that we should be working to get rid of" might be a more prosperous world, which would make you an evil person in my eyes.
And finally, you ignore the benefits of diversity and of competition between cultures. It is far from a given that a single homogenic culture is even capable of being the most perfect and efficient world possible, or even capable of not being one of the worse world possible, in which case your solution would be self-defeating.
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