I.e $100k a year in NYC = lower middle class. $100k a year in Kentucky = upper middle class.
I wonder if economic skepticism skews upward the closer you live to an urban area.
One definition of the middle class is the 30 percentiles around the median (i.e. 20th to 80th percentile, or start-of-3rd to end-of-8th decile). In NYC, that would be 10k-82k (2016). $100k in NYC would be upper middle class by this definition.
If these numbers are surprising to you, they should be! with a not-uncommon tech salary of 140k+ of nominal income, you are above the 90th percentile in NYC.
It's kind of hard for our bubble to imagine that people survive on minimum wage (30k/year in NYC 2021), and yet literally 1.9 million did in 2016.
source for 2016 data: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-16/snapshot-...
It’s easy to “survive”. It’s not possible to properly save for emergency expenses, retirement, and have access to routine dental care, or plan an upward path for your family.