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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

> Mason wage was fairly representative of other “middle class” citizens (merchants, clerks, craftsmen, etc).

Very interesting analysis overall, but my biggest nitpick is that it's easy to call this group middle class, but it's so much smaller of a percentage of the population than we might be used to today. For roughly every 20 farmers, there may have been 1-2 people who were literally anything else. That's craftsmen, nobles, clergy, etc.

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What does the proportion of the population have to do with whether it's truly middle-class? Is it not (along a logarithmic scale) a halfway point between poverty and truly rich?

Halfway along a logarithmic scale what a beautiful way to describe it. I am surprised at accurate that image is. Where did you hear this expression?

The earliest usage of the idea of "log utility of wealth" I'm aware of is in Daniel Bernoulli's work on the St. Petersburg lottery [0], but it pops up all over mathematical finance stuff.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-stpetersburg/

> Is it not (along a logarithmic scale) a halfway point between poverty and truly rich?

No. Traditionally the middle class was at least as rich as the upper class. What made them a "middle class" was that they weren't highborn, like the upper classes, but they also weren't poor, like the lower classes.

We often use "middle class" as an analogue to a "normal" experience. But in earlier periods it was clearly the exception.

Actually "middle class" was first used in the 1700s to denote the class between the peasants and the nobles -- i.e. the merchants or bourgeoisie.

As opposed to it being the "normal" experience in the strict normal distributional terms, the reality is (a) income and social status is not a normal distribution -- it is extremely right skewed and (b) given some concepts of class divisions (e.g. peasants, merchants, nobles in previous centuries or blue collar, white collar professionals, and the rick (i.e. those who's earnings from capital returns as opposed to salary) today) middle class has tended to represent the group in the middle (as opposed to the person in the middle.

Thus, even if the bottom group of poor people is very very large, the middle class is not the mean of the population.

This is extremely clear on our usage when we say things like "Guatemala has a very small middle class as it is mostly poor people and some old money rich people."

That sounds like a problem of people not understanding what middle class means. Its even worse than that, its a fairly basic part of history class when talking about things like the American and French revolutions. If your biggest nitpick is that the author isn't using the phrase "middle class" incorrectly, then I don't see anything to complain about.

This is what middle class has basically always referred to until people (mostly Americans) began using it to refer to people who are at like the 50%ile.

Yeah, the "middle class" in the US was rich for all of 50 years after WW2. Things are just moving back to normalcy.

Yes, the word is used very differently in the UK vs. the US. In the UK "middle class" means wealthier than average, a professional (manager, doctor, lawyer, professor, etc), what we used to call a "yuppie", while your average laborer is "working class". In the US almost everyone but the poor and the very well off are called middle class.

In the US the term “Professional-Managerial Class” or PMC is catching on in certain circles to try to represent this. There’s also the term “upper middle class” which really just means middle class in most cases.

One difference in the US and a lot of European countries, to be fair, is that our tax/retirement policies encourage you to acquire significant amounts of personal capital. So there may be a big qualitative difference between PMC members here and elsewhere in terms of actual wealth.

We are too far gone to relabel middle class though, it’s a lost cause. Lots of working class people (even on the low end of incomes) see themselves as middle class.

People with a house and 401k do (justly) expect themselves to live off capital at some point, and therefore are middle class rather than working class.

Though they might also think the underclass like farm migrants are working-class.

Middle class in England used to mean wealthy but without any actual title. Since the US lacks entitled people (meant in a literal way) there was no one for the term upper class to apply too, so I think everything else just had to move around to adjust for that.

20 people were farmers in that they farmed, but they also did a huge other number of things that we today wouldn't attribute to farmers. The built houses/bridges. They were woodcutters. And a good number of them were also part-time soldiers, at lease during fighting season. So while most people did farm, that doesnt mean than every other job was rare. Those other jobs were done by the farmers when they weren't farming.

"Middle class" historically did not mean middle income. Middle class was literally that, people who were of the class that sat between serfs/peasants and nobility. That is, guild master craftsmen (not the apprentices and worker bees), merchants, bankers, educated clerks and the like. That is, what we today would consider "professionals".

Even more importantly, these farmers were, for the most part, slaves. The article is describing a society where for every one "middle class person" just like us, there were 20 slaves working full time to support him. It is then comparing the living standard of that one person surviving off essentially 20 slaves to the living standard of the average person today in a society with no slaves.

Of course, as long as this is emphasized then the article really does do a good job of making it clear how much things have improved for everyone on Earth in the last 500 years.

It's hard to find much substantial or practical difference between a serf and a slave, but to add some nuance a serf definitely had some fairly substantial rights in England, at least theoretically that a slave in the modern sense does not.

And it might be a subtle distinction in practice, but a serf's labor was what was owned by their lord, not their persons.

Some distinctions:

- Killing a serf is murder, killing a slave is property damage.

- A serf can bear witness, and accuse. A slave cannot.

- A slave can be sold and forced to go wherever the new owner wills. A serf cannot.

Do you have a degree in history? How many history books have you read cover to cover?

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