My dad worked on an assembly line making vacuum tubes. After that he was a calculator repairman for most of his life.

Calculator Repairman.

An entire life that is obsolete now. Because we no longer do much of the drudgery of assembly lines; we have machines that do it. Calculators (and other things) that used to require an entire infrastructure to keep running are now cheap and disposable.

Why can’t a high school graduate raise a family of four and buy a house? Because this isn’t that world. We’ve eliminated a lot of the jobs the middle class used to do.

Not on purpose, just because.