Huh? There wasn't anything remotely middle class about Dan and Roseanne in my memory. They were proudly working class.
To me middle class means university educated, professional, two foreign holidays a year.
To me middle class means university educated, professional, two foreign holidays a year.
Middle class Americans don't get two foreign holidays a year. They get two foreign holidays per lifetime. One if they also decide to visit Hawaii. I consider myself lucky if I can spend an entire 40 hours of PTO at once on one 9-day vacation at a U.S. beach town or national park. It isn't just the money. The U.S. is huge, and much of it is undeveloped land. Getting anywhere more interesting than where you already are takes an inconveniently large investment in time and travel aggravation, and that time could have been spent relaxing instead.
And remember, the U.S. median only gets about $54k in gross household [edit] income. If two working parents have 2 kids, they are likely taking one week every year, to somewhere cheap and close, and maybe visiting a theme park cluster city such as Orlando, Florida, only once per decade. If you are upper-middle class, you also get to visit Europe once, and Hawaii once. Anybody who needs their passport more often than that is likely going to countries having less infrastructure with their religious group, to proselytize by example.
Actually that number is median -household- income, not individual income.
For example, I've known impoverished upper middle class people, people who self identified as working class (e.g. drinking in the miners welfare) even though they had millions in the bank and not particularly well off upper-class people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United...
Edit: As might be expected, nothing about the class system in the UK is clear cut, consistent or particularly logical.
Geography plays into this quite a bit, too. The cost of living is lower in the Midwest so it's possible to live a larger lifestyle on more of a working-class salary.
How they obtain the money (education, job) or how they spend it (house, holiday) is not important by definition - however there is some social expectations of the American middle class.
Many Americans don't have the time off work for two holidays a year, even if they have plenty of money, which is another difference, which changes the American social expectations of the US "middle class."
A family with nurse and a teacher for example (two professionals) would bring in somewhere around $100,000/yr and be upper class.
There's a lot of variations by geography (cost of living) and stuff too, but I simplified it.
In reality the amount of financial security a family has is often a function of how well they manage it (as long as you are making above a certain amount where it becomes possible for financial security). If the above mentioned family over spent on a big house, two cars, a motorcycle, and other luxuries they consider normal, or even needed, then they can surely feel like they are living without much financial security, which doesn't "feel" upper class.
Unfortunately, middle class is a totally useless term because almost everyone describes themselves as middle class, I guess because they are somewhat out of touch with their spending and don't feel rich (previously mentioned family) or they are towards the bottom they don't want to feel poor. People who have a household income of $200,000 describe themselves as middle class. One of my coworkers, with a straight face, described me as middle class. I couldn't believe it - with a household income more than 3x the median household income in the US I can't with a straight face say I am middle class.
That's why politicians pander to "the middle class," because the majority of Americans identify with the middle class - even poor ones who don't consider themselves middle class but feel they will be there soon.
On the other side of the coin I have a friend who makes a middle class income, spends lavishly on consumer goods, and is always complaining about how poor she is.
Like I said, totally useless term.
What I don't understand is why you'd turn class into a proxy for personal wealth, there are already lots of ways to refer to that - wages, household income, net worth - whereas class [in the UK] is a far more nuanced measure of ancestry, culture, occupation and attitudes to all of those things.
The US has a very "anyone can get rich" kind of cultural ethos so it makes sense our definitions would be very different.
There's also a distinction between upper class and the "frigging filthy rich" (salary in the millions) in the US. Lately they've been called "the 1%."
[Answer is probably "language isn't logical" but I'd settle for your reason not to use the more informative approach.]
It might actually be simpler in the UK - nobody describes themselves as working class anymore and there are very real upper class people so everyone from the PM down is middle class.
http://blogs.wsj.com/iainmartin/2010/08/10/how-middle-class-...
NB I like that quiz - if you enjoy drinking to excess and fighting you are working class or upper class but definitely not middle class (by UK standards).
Edit: I guess another way of defining "middle class" by UK standards is "someone worried about social status" - traditionally neither the upper classes or the working classes cared about social status.
To me upper class means the literally Queen, or at least something like her cousin's son's uncle or something like that.
If you don't own a country estate or have any staff then you aren't upper class.
I wouldn't call the Queen or Prince "upper class", I'd call them the nobility. You still have remnants of an actual feudal class system whereas we do not. Our classes go solely by income. Roughly speaking, the lowest 25% is poor, anything between 25-90% is middle class (a term which has expanded over the years), 90-99% is upper middle class, and the top 1% is upper class. Of course there is no hard and fast agreement on it, and others will disagree about the exact demarcation lines on those ranges, but it's the same gist.
So I personally wouldn't call a nurse and a teacher upper class, but they could easily be upper middle class.
As an American I wouldn't call the queen upper class, I'd call her nobility or royality, a different class altogether and not really compatible to the American "class system" (so to speak).
American super rich have their own category too, I should have mentioned. Don't think there's a real concrete word for them but they are called stuff like "trust fund baby"(if they are rich because their parents are and don't have to work), the 1%, millionaires, and the super rich. There is a growing divide between the rich and the super rich in the US in the last several decades, which plays into it.
destitute - checks discarded transit cards for remaining balances
poor - buys monthly transit passes
lower - buys used car with predatory/dealer "pay here" financing
lower-middle - buys used car with bank/CU financing
upper-middle - buys used car with cash, or new car with bank/CU financing
upper - buys new car with cash
rich - drives company car leased by an owned business, but uses taxis and Ubers in the city
ultra-rich - never drives; has on-call professional driver/pilot employeesHe's as wealthy as they come but pretty clearly working class IMO.
Beckham is by no means "working class" -- though he might have been born as such.
He is just not royalty and hadn't grown up from families owing castles and being members in the house of lords.
I'm (lower) middle class, earn less than a lot of working class people; there are different cultural circles that follow different lines to financial worth. That's how the class system is seen here.
Being royalty wouldn't make him any better, just different, probably make him far worse in many people's eyes but if he were royal he'd be part of the peerage whether he lived in a council flat or a palace.
On Beckham no. On working class people but not Beckham-rich, many.
I've had some experience with BBC people.
All the technicians and lower level staff were working class.
All the journalists were public school people (in UK, "public school" actually means: expensive prestigious school).
They didn't seem to have any social connection, didn't even eat all together at the same table at the end of work -- each group had their own table. And I'm not talking famous journalists and tv-stars snubbing mere mortals: it was just actual run of the mill reporters and journalists.
You don't get this behavior in where I come from.
I was also surprised to find out that from Monty Python to Mr. Bean (R.A), and Hugh Laurie, Fry, etc, almost all famous TV comedians (at least up to the 90s) in Britain were public school people -- and all of these were specifically Cambridge and Oxford. Which shows what it took to be on TV back in the day. You don't get that in the US either.
Not to the same degree certainly. But historically, the eastern journalism establishment (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, the network news operations) drew very heavily from the Ivy League and related schools
Whereas American English mostly, when it adopted class language, got it from traditional discussions of capitalist class structure, but its since evolved to where frequently "middle class" is used to mean "middle income" (solidly in the working class in the classical divide of classes in capitalist society), and the traditional capitalist middle class is "upper middle class" (or sometimes even "upper class"), and the capitalist upper class -- the owners of capital who rent labor -- are mostly just not discussed at all as a class of people, but as abstract institutions if at all.
The working class, as the name implies, earn their money by working. The upper class make their money through investments. The middle class fall in between. They make part of their income by working and part of their income through investments.
The practical implications are that if the working class stop working, they can no longer make ends meet. The middle class have the opportunity to stop working for periods of time, but not indefinitely. The upper class can survive without ever lifting a finger.
"We'll send the electric bill to the water company, and the water bill to the electric company. Then forget to sign the check for the phone bill."
See what I said about houses being much bigger today than they used to be.