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tempz

There is a linguistic problem here - extending the term 'middle class' to hide prevailing poverty in the US.

You are not middle class if:

- you will lose home, car if you are out of job for 6-10 months;

- you don't take 30 days vacation a year;

- you cannot afford health services without going to debt;

- you cannot send your kids to university;

- your diet is mostly junk food because you can't afford fresh stuff.

If some of the above is true, you are poor.

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I agree with you, though in the replies you are seeing the difference between how OECD countries define "poor" and how Americans defines "poor".

The vast majority of people in Canada, Australia, Western Europe, etc. would be disgusted by how much "middle class" Americans work, how little vacation they get and how much they get for their tax dollars.

In the eyes of virtually every Developed Country, "middle class" Americans are poor.

Of course, Americans don't have this perspective, because they are in it, they can't see it.

You seem to have left out the fact that Americans make much more than their Canadian, Western European, or Australian counterparts?

Make much more money yes.

But how much of that gap is left if you factor in things like health care, access to education and infrastructure?

Just checked. Scandinavian countries, Australia and Luxembourg have higher median household income than the U.S.

Those countries are small; the total population between them is less than any of UK, France, Japan or Germany, which indeed have a lower PPP per capita than the US. The nations you mentioned also have the advantage of being the "best" countries in their respective regions attracting lots of high skilled immigrants and FDI etc.

This summer I worked at a startup in Luxembourg. I overheard a job interview my boss conducted, where an Australian with a PhD in machine learning asked for EUR60k as a salary. My boss decided to offer him EUR50k.

Costs of living in Luxembourg are about the same as in Santa Barbara (where I currently live).

I think median salaries in Luxembourg might be skewed by the presence of a large financial market (it's kind of a Wall St of Europe).

My impression is that it's the other way around; working in the computer industry carries a higher pay premium (vs. working in some other field) in Silicon Valley than it does anywhere else. So while a chef might be better off in Luxembourg, the software engineer is better off in silicon valley.

You might be right, but 50k is way too low for a software engineer anywhere in US.

What are you talking about?

The prevailing wage law of the H1B is only $60k, and these are for the best and brightest workers our mega corps need, due to a lack of qualified US workers.

So obviously, $50k is more than adequate. /s

So like 20 million people? What about the countries that make up the vast majority of Europe? Median income is much higher in the US than in UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy.

Not by much if you deduct retirement benefits, healthcare costs and education.

Income is only relevant when you factor in the cost of living.

Also, my point is exactly that many countries consider you "poor" if you have to work 70+ hours per week and get 2 weeks (or no) leave, even if you make $150k. That's why I said many OECD countries consider Americans "poor". (in quotes). Not poor in the sense of not much money, but "poor" in the broader sense.

A developer that makes $160k in Seattle would top out at 55k euro in Berlin. But you can get a 1/bd flat for <600eu a month in Berlin, where as in Seattle, you'll be paying over $2k.

Not even taking into account that a Germany resident could get public health care, lower cost for transportation, and could live and work in most areas without ever needing a car.

There is considerably less income inequality. Because your specific profession makes less isn't necessarily a bad thing.

As someone who has lived in both the US and Canada as a middle class person, I'm way better off in the US.

  > take 30 days vacation a year

I know people who earn seven figures who don't, and honestly can't, do this. Vacation is also a function of workplace culture, not just discretionary income and allotted vacation days.

If you're making 7 figures (i.e. >$1M/year) you can afford to save $0.5M/year. After ten years or so you can retire. I think that counts as being able to "afford" (an average of) 30 days off/year.

10 years? Try again, even if you are burning 200k a year you can do it in 5 1/2 years.

Depends on what kind of lifestyle you want to be able to sustain. Also, I think you might not be figuring in taxes.

so, there's what, 11 standard paid holidays, so 30 days off would be 'four weeks of vacation' - The set of people who make more than a million dollars a year who can't negotiate four weeks of vacation... I think is small.

There's this persistent myth of the driven executive... I mean, I guess it's possible that other fields of endeavor are different? but everywhere I've worked? the more they pay you, the better they treat you, the more vacation you get, and ultimately the less you are expected to actually work.

> the less you are expected to actually work.

if you're talking about actual time spent working, may be. But the output for an expensive person needs to be high. Granted, how does one measure the output of a typical multi-million dollar CEO on bottom line performance (vs just good general economic conditions)?

Yes, time spent working is exactly what I meant.

Would you please consider that not everyone works in the same field as you?

I worked on a trading floor with a trader, early 30s, very profitable and well respected. Took a week off to go to the Mediterranean with his girlfriend (from what I hear, he proposed to her on that trip). Had his mandatory two-week vacation the next month. While he was away on that two-week vacation, I heard several people, including the group head, criticizing him behind his back for taking so much time off -- despite every trader on that floor having four weeks of vacation, two contiguous weeks of which were mandatory.

Just because something hasn't happened in your own experience, doesn't mean that it doesn't happen in other sectors. This guy was the right-hand man to his boss and he still got criticized for taking his mandatory vacation.

I once took a single day of vacation to finish moving into my new apartment, and I was made fun of publicly and criticized for it by a number of semi-senior people who weren't even in my chain of command.

Not every company has a culture of asynchronicity, and not every career path offers a healthy balance of work and life. There is also a difference between having vacation days, and being able to take them without hurting your reputation and compensation.

If people are depending on you to be perpetually present, prepared, and profitable -- whether as a trader, an executive, or any other role -- there's social pressure to minimize vacation. And that pressure is amplified in the culturally dog-eat-dog industries, I reckon.

compare this to your average retail job, where not only do you get zero paid vacation, and you get your schedule, if you are lucky, a week ahead.

As far as I can tell, this holds in the middle, too; I do okay, but I don't get paid like a very profitable broker, and I don't get four weeks vacation (not usually, anyhow... it is pretty easy for me to quit and get another job, of course, but that usually results in less of a raise than going from having a job to having another job.)

My point is just that there's a pretty strong correlation between getting paid more and being treated better in other ways. It's not an absolute correlation, certainly; but the fact that the man had four weeks off and had a job to come back to, I think, supports my assertion more than the fact he got criticized for taking it all at once detracts from it.

"I know people who earn seven figures who don't, and honestly can't, do this."

Don't want to? Sure. Can't? Wrong. They absolutely could.

So pretty much every scientist at my (US) company is poor? Even uppermanagement in r&d. None of us see 30 days off per year. At most of is 25 after 2 decades.

I'd say 15 days instead of 30 seems fair number for America and probably 30 for europe

I feel sorry for you.. buy yes.

you've never been a scientist, have you? The experiments don't care about how much vacation you're legally entitled to.

Sure, if you’re a lab rat or a PhD student.

I believe the correct terms are ambitious or accomplished.

Ambitious. Sure, but accomplished? Oh if only hard work necessarily equates to that...

Not as good a scientist as possibe unless it is so.

That's why they call it a LABORatory . . .

It's cheaper to buy fresh food than junk food. If you're buying junk food it's because you don't have a place to cook or you're too lazy to cook.

It could also be that you are too overworked to cook or that you are so illiquid that you cannot afford needed repairs.

You don't need to cook in order to eat well.

Salads are a thing.

You need to do the dishes when done. I am familiar with people who are saving money in order to have the sewer lateral fixed.

We're talking a single bowl here, and fork. If you're that hard up that you can't even wash something out with water. Clean it out with a towel, and use it again. Shit, as a bachelor, I do that now, and I've got plenty of cash.

Eat it out of the package that the stuff came in instead if cleaning is an issue

Poor student tricks work past being a student.

I cook stews in a rice cooker w/ slow cook setting, and I eat the stew right out of the cooker pan. Cheap, healthy, quick and one (nonstick) dish to deal with.

My metric for food price is calories per penny. For example, the 760 calorie slice of pizza for $1.99 at Costco works out to about 3.8 calories per penny, while the 500 calorie Caesar salad for $3.99 works out to about 1.3 calories per penny. In my worked example, the fresh food is more expensive than the junk food from the point of view of 'How much money do I need to spend to keep myself alive today?' Could you post some examples of the calories per penny of the fresh food and junk food costs you are referring to?

A pound of uncooked white rice is $0.69, and it has 1696 calories, which works out to 24.6 calories per penny. That's about 19x better by your metric.

Yep, and it doesn't take much to turn that rice into a full meal. If you've got a freezer and a microwave, fresh-frozen veggies are a good alternative to always buying fresh veggies for the time constrained. It's a little more expensive but you lose virtually none of the health benefits and gain ease of preparation.

Throw some veggies in with the rice and some soy or teriyaki sauce, and you've got a healthy meal that is compatible with most diets. If you're a meat eater, you can cook some chicken breast to go with it; if not, some tofu for protein will help make it more filling.

You have to factor in the time it takes to cook. Let's say you cook all the rice at once and it takes 20 minutes. At minimum wage of $7.25, that's $2.42 in addition to the 0.69 for the bag of rice, yielding 5.4 calories per penny, within the same order of magnitude as the prepared foods I gave as an example.

I acknowledge that a person's time isn't always tradable for wages, and that home cooking is generally cheaper and more satisfying.

I don't find the time argument very compelling. It takes just a minute or two to boil water, you throw in the rice, and simmer for another twenty. Sure, it takes twenty two minutes, but twenty of those are just waiting. Normally I start the rice and then prepare the rest of the meal while it's simmering. Maybe 20-30 minutes for the whole meal.

Time-wise fast food isn't as efficient as it would seem at first glance. If you go during a normal meal time (which you pretty much have to do if you have kids), between travel time and waiting at the register, it's going to end up taking as long as a home cooked meal.

You can buy an entire sackful of potatoes for around the cost of two slices of pizza, and it'll last for weeks. Or several pounds of flour which will likewise last for a while--you could make your pizza bases in a few minutes if you wanted to, then just add the toppings you want. These are all vastly better value for money than buying pre-made food.

I don't buy for a moment that processed food is cheaper than the raw ingredients. The processing has a significant cost. The main factor for many people is pure laziness--they can't be bothered to spend 10 minutes preparing stuff; they'd rather waste money on processed food.

> entire sackful of potatoes

if you have a kitchen to cook them, yes. else you probably have just a sack of vegetables that nobody could eat in his raw form. living in a box means eating pre-made food and you can buy healthy pre-made food (like the cesars salad) it's just not affordable.

I don't think a majority of people who are poor are lacking access to basic cookware or some means to cook food. You can purchase a brand new Crock-Pot for $15.

I do think there's an under appreciation for how time-poor most people are (moreso the less money you have). Or how a lack of basic cooking skills or knowledge keep people buying fast food instead of buying and preparing fresh, healthier food at home. I've invested a whole lot of time choosing recipes and learning how to buy, prepare, and store food. A friend of mine complained that going to the grocery store cost him more money than eating out. Turns out, he was just buying frozen dinners. One of my recent favorite meals to make is dried black beans, rice, and a shredded rotisserie chicken. The chicken is optional, the source ingredients are dry, less than $1/lb, freeze well after preparing, and don't require any special tools or skills.

While I think food insecurity is a huge concern for kids, the cost of food and the percentage of income being spent on food has halved over the last 50 years [1]. (I wish they showed what the lowest quintile was spending over time)

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/yo...

Nowaday you don’t need a kitchen to cook. Pizza/toaster oven, sous vide machine/crock pot/instapot, hot plate/griddle or George foreman or a blow torch, microwave and a fridge.

I thought those George Foreman grills were a gimmick (come on, they were selling it on informercials!), but a buddy of mine bought one and he swears by it.

We bought one for a family member with Alzheimer's for fear they would burn the house down otherwise.

Works fine but the burgers come out a bit dry.

I think that was part of the point of the parent comment.

"I don't buy for a moment that processed food is cheaper than the raw ingredients. The processing has a significant cost. The main factor for many people is pure laziness--they can't be bothered to spend 10 minutes preparing stuff; they'd rather waste money on processed food."

When was the last time you worked multiple jobs, and had to take care for kids? That 10 minutes is not readily available.

This is a ridiculous comparison where you're cherry picking data. You're comparing something that is loaded with fat to something that is mostly water (the salad bit). Compare the slice of pizza to a can of beans from Walmart (https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Black-Beans-15-25-oz/...), 385 calories for 50 cents, and its pretty easily beat costwise and healthwise.

Ground beef, even at whole foods comes out to about 2 calories / penny. Getting it at a regular store would put it at 3 to 4 calories per penny. Rice is 3.2 beans even better.

You can mix all these things in endless ways with a little creativity.

You could free fat from the Costco meat dept and have an infinite metric.

I'm not sure why you're being down voted here but you're pretty close to correct. There have been many recent studies showing fast food really isn't cheaper than buying other types of healthier food. It is pretty close because there are an incredible amount of low cost high calorie foods like beans, nuts, rice, cheap cuts of meat, the list goes on. Here is one from the UK Economic Affairs: https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Cheap-as-Chips...

The conclusion to save you a click: Food in the UK has never been more affordable and healthy food is generally cheaper than unhealthy food. A day’s diet that meets the requirements of the Eatwell Guide can be purchased for less than the price of two cheap supermarket ready-meals and for much less than a single meal at a fast food chain. Switching to healthier versions of many staple products can be achieved at no extra cost, and a wide range of fruit, vegetables and carbohydrates can be bought in supermarkets for less than £1 per kilogram. Five portions of fruit and vegetables can be purchased for as little as 30p.

Some studies that have come to the opposite conclusion have used a cost-per-calorie measure of food pricing which makes high-energy food appear expensive regardless of the cost of a meal. Others have compared a small selection of food products which are classified as ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ on the basis of relatively minor differences. By looking at the cost by edible weight and studying the price of typical food portions, this report has been able to make better comparisons between the cost of healthy and unhealthy diets in Britain today.

We conclude that the real question is not why unhealthy food is so cheap but why people consume unhealthy food despite it being more expensive. The answer, we suggest, is that taste and convenience often play a larger role in people’s food choices than price or nutritional quality.

>We conclude that the real question is not why unhealthy food is so cheap but why people consume unhealthy food despite it being more expensive. The answer, we suggest, is that taste and convenience often play a larger role in people’s food choices than price or nutritional quality.

I suggest you consider the fact that many people in the US, especially in poor, urban areas live in "food deserts" where there are no supermarkets close by that sell healthy food at reasonable costs.

http://americannutritionassociation.org/newsletter/usda-defi...

If you are poor and have no vehicle you depend on mass transit. This costs both money and time. If you are poor and lucky enough to have a job, its likely to be a low-paying job with a lengthy commute (in terms of time, bus and train transfers, if not in distance). This leaves you very little free time to spend half of a day for a lengthy trip outside of your food desert to get some fresh food. There is also the issue of bringing your groceries home. Have you ever tried to ride the bus or the train while carrying a bunch of packages, especially when it is crowded? How about transferring buses and trains while trying to carrying several packages? Do you have a proper kitchen? Many poor people don't. Proper storage facilities and equipment? Most poor people have roaches.

These are just some of the collective obstacles faced by many poor people in terms of their access to fresh food.

>Lee also notes in her study that, on closer inspection, food deserts don’t actually exist in the U.S., at least not as a national problem—on average, poor neighborhoods have more grocery stores than wealthier neighborhoods.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2014/02/food_deserts...

It's more likely that unhealthy food is the one source of pleasure that a poor person can afford, and with all the troubles of their lives, they may find solice in eating the delicious junk. Healthy food either takes a bunch of effort, or don't taste very good (unless you couple it with some expensive condiments/spices).

This is basically Scott Adams's "Pleasure Unit Theory", which I find very plausible: http://pratie.blogspot.com/2006/04/scott-adams-pleasure-unit... . If it's true, then developing healthy food that's convenient and tasty will do a lot more good than hectoring people about their bad decisions.

We can't fix everyone's problems. Hectoring may be bad, but at the end of the day a lot of change has to come from the people making bad decisions. Sacrifice for ones children should be the norm, otherwise they shouldn't be bringing them into such a suffering existence.

Tasteful, healthy food doesn't take that much effort, but you do have to know a little bit about cooking.

Or have the time to cook. Which is a very important criteria, as someone who works two jobs likely does not have the luxury of that amount of time.

by your measure most people in the USA are poor

I would guess about 80%+

Which bullet points - if not all- would you exclude from the list to make it relevant ?

The only one which is not a routine part of the middle class experience these days is eating strictly junk food because you can't afford anything better.

Every other part of that entire list is, sadly enough, "normal middle class" in the US.

One interesting factoid I know is that 50% of Americans represent 2% of the income in America.

“The shrinking middle class” is a phrase that is part of common discourse here for a reason - I wouldn’t be surprised if 80% of Americans fit the parent comment’s definition.

One interesting factoid I know is that 50% of Americans represent 2% of the income in America.

More like 15%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/203247/shares-of-househo...

> One interesting factoid I know is that 50% of Americans represent 2% of the income in America.

Reference?

This recent study[1] suggests the bottom 50% income represents 12.5% pre-tax, 19.3% post-tax based on 2014 data.

[1] http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2018QJE.pdf see p. 39, Table I

I would like to remind everyone that the trillions of US debt is financed by a global elite who LITERALLY own America.

That’s probably 2% of the wealth, not income. I believe that the bottom 80% of Americans together have something like 7 or 8% of US wealth.

Perhaps that's indicative not of a problem with the measure but rather of a) a disconnect between our society's self-perception and its reality and/or b) a problem with our economic system, the opportunities available in it, and the saving/spending norms it propagates?

this video tells what the average american thinks of the wealth distribution, vs reality (vs ideal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

it's very enlightening.

Do you mean 30 days total vacation, or 30 days of elective pto in addition to company wide vacation days?

I don't know how this matters.

Relatively few companies I'm aware of offer 6 weeks pto. That requirement would put a senior engineer at google or Facebook not in the middle class, despite being in the top 1% of incomes.

How doesn't it matter? It's, for most employers, an 10-11 day difference.

I’m a senior developer in the Washington DC area and 1) I definitely do not take 30 days vacation per year and 2) I can assure you that I would lose my house and probably more if I was out of a job for 6-10 months. So I guess regardless of the very good salary I make, I’m poor?

You can make a good salary and still live paycheck-to-paycheck. If you can't afford a good, strong cushion (regardless of how good or bad your salary is), I'd consider that a certain degree of poor.

Middle class definitions vary but one of the easier to remember metrics is between 2/3rds and 2x the national median per capita gross income. (Tax burden, geography, number of dependents, all skew this simplistic measure.)

I'd like to agree with the vacation value, but I don't know any Americans other than myself taking 30 days of vacation a year. The very idea of 30 days vacation makes my friends panic, what would they do?!

Also, poor diet is related to poverty due mainly to bad nutritional education and bad habits learned at home, not affordability. Processed foods with a lot of sugar, salt, MSG added, manipulate the brain into wanting disproportionately more of these foods, which are primarily empty calories.

Yes, and by that criteria, most Americans are poor.

30 Days of vacation a year?

That's insane.

For regular, full time employees, 28 is typical in Germany. 24 is the legal minimum.

Norwegian here. 20 days a year is the legal minimum, while 25 days is the norm. I get 30 days a year while working for an American company, which is a bit ironic.

Don’t forget all the inneklemt days. May next year is a inneklemt bonanza. I doubt there will be much done at all in the country in May.

(It’s common in Norway to take any day that is between two off days off. So May 1st is a national holiday, next year it falls on a Tuesday, so that means many will take the Monday off, a so called innneklemt day. There’s a lot of holidays in May, and next year all of them creates inneklemt days.)

NZ has a minimum 4 weeks annual leave (20 days not counting weekends) plus 11 statutory public holidays. Australia is basically the same.

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