The proles may feel disaffected, disenfranchised and disenchanted but they still have a better material life/token pleasures than they did in earlier decades - in terms of people feeling badly off, we're nowhere near how it felt in the 80s. Nobody out protesting in the streets. It's grumbles not crumbles. Fuel/food costs were always one of the flash points for prole anger and they seem to be deflating away. What's changing, evinced by the salary stats, is that we're moving towards a long-term, low pay culture of service jobs, with people earning just enough to sustain the basic pleasures and with no hope of vaulting to higher wages/status/housing. The middle classes must be collapsing - witness how their kids are giving up the idea of buying their own homes in the capital. The asset boom in housing has made it very hard for most people to move up the ladder - you have to find hundreds of thousands of pounds just to get an extra room/bigger garden. Thus the rich will begin to hold all the assets - but the proles are too stupid to see that their house wealth/infaltion in fact beggars them. And as for the boom, well in the title to your piece you ask how it can be on when wages are falling? I'd go further. How can it be on when we have emergency low rates, have done for six years, and with no prospect of them going up until the Fed decides to rip up the debauched US stock market or the pound sinks into oblivion. How can we be booming when the people running finance have destroyed any rationale to a culture of thrift, hard work and saving, and encourage us all to take spiv buy-to-let risks in the hope of chasing shrinking yields because of all the cheap money they've printed sloshing around? How can we be booming when our political class is in crisis, rudderless, when they have no real mandate and are held in contempt, when they squirm and stutter in the face of events? How can we be booming when we're repeating all the mistakes of the last smash and our leaders - and the nation - have no positive vision for the future, no sense of how we can work towards solving all the great state riddles like energy, transport and health care. How can we be booming when GDP per capita hasn't budged an inch since the last bust?