Playball40
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I'm curious as to what is considered 'middle class' and how much that has changed over the last two decades. Does anyone have a legitimate source I could research? Does middle class change by region or even city?
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What is considered "Middle Class" in this country?
- Thread starter Playball40
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It is complicated by the question of whhether “middle” is average or median.
The people who want the middle class to be large and oppressed consider it median. The people who want the middle class to be small and refined consider it average.
Many people who consider themselves “middle class” are in the top 5% of income earners.
Many people who consider themselves “middle class” are living paycheck to paycheck in a double-wide.
(Assuming by “this country” you mean USA, since I don’t hear much about “middle class” from non USAians)
The people who want the middle class to be large and oppressed consider it median. The people who want the middle class to be small and refined consider it average.
Many people who consider themselves “middle class” are in the top 5% of income earners.
Many people who consider themselves “middle class” are living paycheck to paycheck in a double-wide.
(Assuming by “this country” you mean USA, since I don’t hear much about “middle class” from non USAians)
Please do not butcher statistics like this. You can't consider "median" and "average" as opposed things. Median is a subset of average!
TV and credit cards
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I think in the US, middle class dovetails in with the “American Dream” and has largely come to be defined by feeling secure in your sources of income and comfortable in your lifestyle.
J842P
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What do you mean?
Derec
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Jayjay
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I think the term is all but useless. Everybody wants to identify as middle-class, so you can't define it by asking people. Looking at income alone, it's completely arbitrary where you set the bar.
DrZoidberg
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Middle class isn't a question of opinion. There's a definition. The upper class don't need to work at all. They are born with wealth and their wealth is managed by people in the middle class. They have no need to defend their position of wealth.
The Middle class run the country. The president or prime minister is middle-class. The CEO's of major corporations are middle class. Anybody who has to go to work in the morning is below upper class.
The working class are those who don't own anything. They're salaried workers. They have little or no wealth. Their prime income is not from investments.
In the modern world the upper class is pretty much gone today. The extreme explosion of wealth industrialization caused almost completely wiped out the relative wealth difference of the upper classes. They are now, in practice, reduced to middle class. Todays' upper class is basically only the top most royal families in each monarchist country. The rest are middle class.
The extreme explosion industrial wealth put so much money in the hands of the working class that they started to invest. A huge percentage of those in traditionally working class families own their own homes, and are therefore technically middle class. Today's working class mostly consists of people with mental problems or substance abuse problems, or some other extreme dysfunction. Otherwise, this group has been wiped out.
We live in a world where almost everybody is middle class.
Which makes the term less useful.
Today we talk more in terms of upper, lower or middle middle class.
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J842P
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Right, informally you might say that about any of the measures of central tendency. I know that. I think Rhea is using average to mean, specifically, the arithmetic mean. In which case, I don't understand in what sense "the median is a subset of average".
Sorry, I meant median and mean.
Jimmy Higgins
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In America, everyone is in the Middle Class.
equally
The lower class is anyone that receives any type of assistance *insert American* doesn't get.
and one more reflection:
Lower Class - Can't afford to live on pay they are making
Middle Class - Can't afford to retire quickly on the the pay they are making
Upper Class - Can afford to retire whenever, but their lifestyle inhibits this
Uber Upper Class - Literally don't have to work and will never become unwealthy
equally
The lower class is anyone that receives any type of assistance *insert American* doesn't get.
and one more reflection:
Lower Class - Can't afford to live on pay they are making
Middle Class - Can't afford to retire quickly on the the pay they are making
Upper Class - Can afford to retire whenever, but their lifestyle inhibits this
Uber Upper Class - Literally don't have to work and will never become unwealthy
untermensche
Contributor
Chomsky says that during the Cold War, as an attempt to show the world how great capitalism was, the great US Middle Class was created.
Unions were allowed to thrive and grow large.
Unions are what drove up wages and benefits for all workers.
When the Cold War ended the wealthy elite had no use for the Middle Class and the unions were crushed, production was moved outside the country, and the Middle Class is dying.
The Middle Class under authoritarian state capitalism is something they will talk about in history one day.
If humanity survives capitalism.
Unions were allowed to thrive and grow large.
Unions are what drove up wages and benefits for all workers.
When the Cold War ended the wealthy elite had no use for the Middle Class and the unions were crushed, production was moved outside the country, and the Middle Class is dying.
The Middle Class under authoritarian state capitalism is something they will talk about in history one day.
If humanity survives capitalism.
Playball40
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So, it's really a political "key word" but doesn't have any practical or economic definition?
Jimmy Higgins
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It is a buzzword, but it can represent a certain group of people that can afford to live on what they make while working for a living, to a certain threshold of income.
Elixir
Made in America
I assume you mean the middle third of the people on that spectrum, not the middle third of the income spectrum itself - which, in many US communities is barely occupied. Such is the state of wealth disparity in the US.
The income spectrum would be a scatter-plot of incomes in a community, so the middle third of people, and the middle third of the spectrum is the same thing. I can see how one would want to politicize the definition, but the only real way to define middle class is this way. Plot incomes, and take the middle third. If many people lean to the left that means there is a large lower class and a small middle class.
laughing dog
Contributor
In statistics, the mean, mode and median are measures of central tendency. In mathematics, the average/mean is the most common value of a group of numbers.
Average can be mean, median or mode. Thus median is one of the possible meanings of average--it's a subset of the things called "average".
Exactly.
Middle class is a band around the "average" income--generally taken as median but I've also seen the mean used. However, there's no definition of how far around that center point you go.
Typically in statistics you would go a certain number of standard deviations around it. However, that's uncommon in popular use. If you want to complain about the "shrinking" middle class you use a fixed percentage of that value, as the scale stretches out this is a smaller percent of the total--but note that this means it moves just as many into the upper class as the lower class.
It's a term with neither an official definition or a natural definition. Thus it can be manipulated and is effectively meaningless.