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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Middle class is not principally about income, its about the method by which you participate in the economy. If your primary means of support is applying your labor to your capital, you are middle class (yeoman farmers, independent small business owners, professionals that own or are full partners in their practices, etc.)

If you primarily live by renting your labor to be applied to someone else's capital, you are working class.

If you primarily live off your own capital, with most of the labor applied to it being labor you rent from others, you are in the capitalist class.

Income correlates with economic class, but neither strictly determines the other. $250K a year is not middle class in the same way that, say, wearing a bowtie is not middle class.

Its possible to be in any (of the three mentioned) economic class and have $250K/year income.

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This definition is probably more useful than the popular one, but I don't think it is what most people understand middle class to mean.

I like the categorization but I think the more common names for those classes are self-employed, employee and business owner.

This would put hedge fund managers under the working class, btw. Which I think actually makes sense.They rent out their labor for others' capital.

Hedge fund managers receive share's as capital for running funds to ensure they have a vested interest.

Plus I'd bet they invest their residual salary in capital.

I think the set of people you are classifying as middle class- applying their own labor to their own capital, which they own free and clear- is a pretty rarified bunch. Practically speaking, the middle class is a myth created by politicians to justify policy that is against working class interests. There are in my view only two classes: working class and capitalist or ruling class.

Classification is hard. By your definition a heart surgeon is selling his labor the same as the ditch digger so they are both middle class.

What about something like: Do you feel like your needs are met and some of your desires are indulged? If you are, you're living a middle class lifestyle.

No, if they're both selling their labor, they are both working class, not middle class.

Though heart surgeons often own practices and contract with facilities rather than being employees, so they are often middle class.

And, yes, real economic relations are complex and don't fall neatly into the categorization, are not of a continuum (e.g., lots of higher income workers that are don't actually love by applying labor to their own capital nevertheless have some some, potentially substantial, capital from which they derive some income (in many cases, not used for current needs but reinvested), and therefore don't face the same insecurity as most of the working class, while still having to deal with employer/employee relations the same way as the rest of the working class. This group shares some features of the working class (because of their primary source of support), the middle class (because the both rely on their labor and have non-trivial capital holdings that are important), and the capitalist class (because generally , to the extent they derive income from capital, it is not through application of their own labor.) Nevertheless, their primary engagement with the economy is as hired laborers, so dominantly, from an economic class perspective, they are working class.

(This is distinct from lifestyle, and from group identity -- indeed, the political manifestation of the divergence between identity and economic class explains a lot of apparent political irrationality jn which people expend considerable effort working against their own economic interests in the political realm because of an identity with an economic class that is not their own.)

well said.

You have just changed my whole perception of everything, and things clicked into place. Thank you.

Are Uber drivers middle class?

This.

- is why I love HN - you open the comment section to leave a comment explaining why the author is an idiot and someone else has already beautifully done it already as the first comment.

Well done, sir.

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