I'm not even going to look but just guess that 60K EUR/year isn't even enough to buy a house near Frankfurt or another decent sized city.
They might be in a high percentile. That only means that most people are very poor.
“Name on building: upper class. Name on desk: middle class. Name on shirt: working class”
It’s not perfect, but the idea is that class as most people conceptualize it is determined by workplace and lifestyle affordances and isn’t a neat percentile cutoff but flexes and wanes in size.
[0] https://www.just-one-liners.com/name-on-building-upper-class...
But it captures the essence of the upper-middle split. The upper class earns income from assets. The middle and lower classes from employment.
This isn’t an economic conversation, but a political one. The upper classes are economically sovereign. The middle and lower classes are beholden to their employers, at least during the savings stage of their careers.
Put another way, a child born to an upper-middle class family gets a leg up in educational opportunities and connections. A child born to an upper-class family may never have to work at all. Their principal challenge is retaining familial relationships. Referring to the upper middle class as “upper class” papers over the exorbitant privilege the latter retains.
Gross income in Europe is also after pension contributions and employer taxes.
[1] https://www.iwkoeln.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Studien/Kurzber...
https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/finance/who-is-rich-defin...
"It would take the average labourer in Zimbabwe 71 years to earn the same amount."
Pensions are usually a part of the "social contract", and usually pensioners have only a few years of expected healthy life left. So in most cases, a pension is more akin to having decent savings than having enough capital to live off investment income perpetually. Also, crucially, pensions rarely pass on money to inheritors, and almost never enough that the inheritors can live indefinitely from the income.
'A few years' seems an understatement for what is reasonably expected to be 20+ years, I'm not sure what difference the healthy modifier brings.
But yes, an annuity wouldn't generally allow you to pass on family wealth. That isn't the dividing line that was being discussed though.
This [1] suggests that $1,180,000 would put you in the top 10% in the US, which if you're living off (and in) it won't stretch that far.
If top 10% of income earners, that's quite a movable feast. If I have $1,000,000 in shares earning 10% and taking all as income, am I rich, if I've got $10,000,000 in less risky investments, and after reinvesting to account for inflation, earning 1% the same amount of rich? One advantage of taking an income from assets is that you can choose how and when.
I suspect the latter approach notionally invested in some prudent fashion would give a figure comparable to a wage, I misses out on some big differences though, no having to work, worry about getting sick, having the money there if you need is a major psychological boost, and if you want to buy a house, you can, plus you can pass on assets, which you can't do with a job.
[1] https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-sta...
Put it this way, India is a relatively wealthy nation and a large proportion of middle class Indians don't have flush toilets. How can you compare that to a middle class European with a straight face?
It's not that the cost of living is lower it's that standards of living are.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Long-Grain-Enriched-R...
No it doesn't. First of all, the price of land can vary wildly. One square meter in the middle of Amsterdam will be a bit more than a square meter in Bumfuck, Alabama. IF you can buy land at all, in some places you can only lease it (you could own a home, but not the ground it sits on). Then there's all kinds of taxes you'd have to pay, just for owning that piece of land.
A 19.5ft by 8ft parking spot in London was on the market a few years back for £350,000, and you won't even be allowed to build a shed on it, just park your car.
An empty lot without even a tin shack can cost more than a mansion, depending on location.
Yes, that was my point, they aren't the same thing at all. It's complete bullshit to say that it costs pretty much the same to live in a tin shack everywhere, as it clearly doesn't.
Your minimum is probably a well, septic tank, permits and so on, this is if you even get planning permission. It's almost certainly going to be cheaper to buy an old terraced house in a post industrial town.
A statistical threshold. Europe has a landed aristocracy with political power, tax and social advantages and investments to last generations. The upper class lives off investment income. The middle class requires income to achieve its goals (if not survive).
The practical effect of this distinction is people over whom employers have power versus those over whom employment, if it exists, is electively pursues.
"Class" in the European sense is not an income based thing. It falls apart a bit at the extremes (what is Jeff Bezos?) but it'd be incorrect to categorise e.g. a CEO as being upper-class despite them being in the 99th percentile by income in their country.
The term really describes nobility, inheritance, large land ownership. Existing in a different 'class'.
Yes, they do. Because it is defined in relative terms -- as the top 10% by (net) income.
EDIT: Why do I get downvoted for a non-emotional, purely factual comment that provides additional information?
A ridiculously stupid definition only some economists can come up with.
A family with a huge mansion and its own multi-billion trust (living expenses paid by the trust) is not upper class, a graduate who owns nothing but debt and has just landed a well-paid job is, according to this definition.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesausbildungsförderungsges...
A trust (Stiftung) owns itself. Its capital gains are not the beneficiaries' capital gains. It may also own the mansion in my example, so good luck taking imputed rents into account.
> Furthermore, university in Germany is basically free and there is government support for poor students (BAföG) [1], so graduate debt is not that much of an issue.
This doesn't change the point that someone who just started a well-paying job and owns nothing but debt is considered "upper class" by this so-called study.
I wish this discussion could move on from this unfortunate, but minor semantic point to the substance, namely that 5160 EUR/month of net income for a couple take you into the top decile in Germany.
It may be a minor semantic point to you, but it's half of what makes the headline a low-effort clickbait as typical for the "Zeit" since it goes against all common sense and why people take offense. The other half is the obvious flaw in the study, also typical for low-quality research that results in such left-populist articles, of asking people sensitive questions about their income (and perhaps wealth) and expecting valid responses.
I wish we would move on to debating why this kind of trashy content gets so much attention and why certain people just crave for it to be published.
People making 100+K per year pretax are making money off of investments in education etc.
PS: For more physical examples, a stripper can deduct cosmetic surgery from their taxes. http://backalleytaxes.com/is-cosmetic-surgery-tax-deductible...