When the ladder collapses

A few days ago, Iraqi media carried the story of a young doctor loading sacks of cement at a construction site.

He had completed medical school. He had done everything society had asked of him. He studied, graduated and acquired the qualifications his country desperately needs. Yet he could not find a job in medicine.

What made the story striking was not simply that a doctor was working in construction. It was that a thread had snapped. The thread connecting education to employment, effort to reward and ambition to opportunity.

That young man is not an exception.

The computer science graduate selling tea from a roadside stall. The civil engineer helping his father in a vegetable market. The teacher discovering that a university degree no longer guarantees a stable future. These are not stories of individual misfortune. They are symptoms of a deeper failure.

In healthy societies, governments like to measure success through growth figures, investment inflows and grand development projects.

Yet there is a simpler and more revealing question:

Does society still reward effort?

READ: Republicans lost the election. Trump keeps talking

Do years of study still improve a person’s chances in life?

Those questions lead us to a subject economists often discuss but rarely define adequately: the middle class.

In much of the Arab world, the middle class is usually described as an income category lying somewhere between wealth and poverty.

In reality, it is something much more important.

The middle class is a social contract.

It is the promise that hard work will be recognised, that education will create opportunities, that saving will produce security and that tomorrow can be better than today. It is less about wealth than certainty. Less about privilege than fairness.

This is why the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith viewed a strong middle class as one of the foundations of social stability. Wealth can create millionaires. It cannot by itself create stable societies. Stability is built by millions of ordinary people who believe in the future strongly enough to invest their lives in it.

For decades, Iraqis understood that bargain.

During the 1960s, 1970s and even much of the 1980s, doctors, engineers, teachers and civil servants occupied a recognisable middle-class space. They were not rich. But they possessed something almost as valuable: predictability.

Families could make plans years ahead.

Parents could reasonably expect their children to live better lives than they had.

Today many Iraqis struggle to predict what will happen in a few months’ time.

What has occurred is not simply economic decline. It is the destruction of confidence in the value of expertise itself.

When young people discover that years spent at university carry little weight in a distorted labour market, the loss extends beyond the individual. Society loses its investment in knowledge. Degrees become framed certificates hanging on walls while the connection between effort and reward gradually evaporates.

Nearly thirty years ago I rented a room from a middle-class British family.

The house had three bedrooms. The family occupied one and rented out the other two to supplement their income. The father worked. The mother stayed home to care for their small children.

One day my editor dropped me off outside the house in his luxury car. Looking at the property with admiration, he remarked that the family clearly understood how to manage their finances.

It was an ordinary scene. Yet it captured something important about Britain at the time.

The family was not wealthy. Their aspirations were modest. Their budgeting was careful. But underneath those routines existed a quiet confidence that discipline and effort would eventually be rewarded.

Even that confidence has been tested in recent years.

Withdrawal and non-withdrawal: The naivete of comparing Iraq to Afghanistan

Rising housing costs, expensive childcare, soaring energy bills and stagnant living standards have forced many British families to work harder simply to maintain their position rather than improve it.

The phrase “middle class” is sometimes used humorously in Britain, often to mock a certain cautious lifestyle or set of cultural habits. Yet beneath the jokes lies a genuine anxiety about declining living standards and shrinking economic security.

Still, the gap between British anxiety and Arab anxiety remains enormous. Britons often worry about slipping down the social ladder.

Many Arabs fear the ladder itself is disappearing. Lebanon offers one of the clearest examples.

The country’s financial collapse did not merely destroy banks and savings accounts. It shattered something far more fragile: middle-class confidence. Doctors, engineers and university professors who had long formed the backbone of Lebanese society suddenly found their savings frozen, their incomes depleted and their expectations demolished.

The money disappeared.

But so did the belief that planning for the future remained a rational activity.

Tunisia tells a different version of the same story.

For decades the country built one of North Africa’s largest and most educated middle classes. Today many young Tunisians enter university no longer convinced that a degree will lead to employment. The route of social mobility that worked for their parents appears increasingly unreliable.

Nobody speaks daily of national collapse.

Yet disappointment seeps quietly into everyday life.

This is why the crisis of the middle class is never merely economic.

It is a crisis of belief. The poor can dream of moving upwards. The wealthy can protect themselves through accumulated assets. The middle class provides society with its equilibrium. It supplies the conviction that gradual progress is possible and that effort retains meaning.

Once that conviction disappears, a society loses more than financial security. It loses its psychological centre of gravity.

Oil revenues should have helped Iraq build one of the strongest middle classes in the region.

Lebanon’s banking sector should have protected a professional class that flourished for decades.

Tunisia’s educational achievements should have strengthened one of its greatest social accomplishments.

Instead, the opposite happened.

The real tragedy is therefore not a doctor working on a building site, a Lebanese engineer quietly emigrating or a Tunisian graduate waiting endlessly for employment. The tragedy is that millions of Arabs are beginning to lose faith in the simple idea upon which modern societies are built: If you work hard, you will get ahead.

Once that belief collapses, an entire social class is threatened. And with it collapses the collective imagination of the future. Nations do not live solely on what they possess today. They live on what their citizens believe they can achieve tomorrow.

And when that belief disappears, the question is no longer how to climb the social ladder. It is whether the ladder is still standing at all.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.