There is hyperbole and then there is this.
Not that the middle class isn't shrinking, but by all measures around half the country is in fact middle class. It feels like people just write in headlines/tweet form now. Facts don't matter.
Not that the middle class isn't shrinking, but by all measures around half the country is in fact middle class. It feels like people just write in headlines/tweet form now. Facts don't matter.
Middle class is being able to live comfortably, get 2 weeks of holiday abroad, afford some but not many luxuries, have a house and enjoy children and hobbies without going bankrupt. Maybe every couple decades you get yourself a nice Audi car.
It is very possible that the middle class is shrinking. But you also have to admit that it's a bit harder to notice it of you're a software engineer in the Silicon Valley on $250k a year and full private life and health insurance.
Even as a software engineer with a decent stint in the top 5% bracket of UK salaries (£70,000) I wonder how the hell am I going to afford a house with more than one bedroom for myself, and I'm already luckier than 95% of the country.
At no point in American history was "2 weeks of holiday abroad" a norm for middle class Americans. In 1990, only 4% of Americans even had a passport. By the year 2000 that had grown to 17%. Today it's 42%.
That means Americans today are 10x more likely to have a passport for international travel than they were 30 years ago. In other words, it would have been incredibly rare for a middle class family in the 1980s to go to Europe for vacation. Meanwhile, it's not that rare for a lower-income American to go to Mexico or the Caribbean today.
I don't know why you guys aren't striking. Interns where I work start at $72k (£60k), with full benefits (the kind across-the-pond'ers think that Americans don't get, which exceed in beneficial-ness their own) and earn WELL over $100k (£84k) the second they graduate and sign on.
Which is more than enough to live comfortably, own a single-family home, and have an annual international vacation
IMO: you need to have great faith in your democratic institutions if you think striking will do anything. As a Millenial, all I have known is austerity. All I have known is strikes earn you fuck all. Hell, you might even be fired for taking a day off to shout in a public square.
No, far less than half the country is in the capitalist-economy middle class (the petit bourgeoisie).
About half of the country may be in a particular income segment of the working class, whose entire purpose for being referred to as “middle class” is to protect the upper class by creating a false class division within the working class, but... so what?
I think if we’re using a definition of “middle class” based around at least half the population always falling into it, a proper summary here would be that the lifestyle of the middle class continues to deteriorate as traditional assets like homes become increasingly unobtainable.
> I think if we’re using a definition of “middle class” based around at least half the population always falling into it
It is however, a defined income level and there is a wealth of data on it. It has shrunk from around 60% of the US population 50 years ago, to around 50% of the population now.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/04/20/how-the-ame...
The definition used in this paper has no ties to actual quality of life criteria or ownership of traditional “middle class” assets (house, car, etc). This is effectively a percentage based definition based around the median income of the country and is more a measure of changes to income inequality than it is a definition of a “middle class.”