> Booz Allen last month admitted no wrongdoing while paying a $377 million settlement
I wish I could get away with that, but i'm middle class.
I wish I could get away with that, but i'm middle class.
I'm just griping with, time after time, a company stealing 100m dollars or whatever and then reaching a settlement that lets them get off scott free after paying back 50m.
When you say you are "middle" what do you mean?
We make ends meet, can afford the things we want to do, but never seem to actually build any savings. (grocery costs are eating us alive this past year or two)
There are three classes: Struggling, comfortable, and rich. If paying for necessities like transport, housing, and food requires significant efforts to manage cash flow or is even impossible, you are struggling. If you don't know when your employer pays you because you haven't had a cash flow problem in a decade, you are comfortable. If you don't have an employer because your wealth comes from things, you are rich.
That doesn't change the fact that almost everybody wants to think of themselves as middle class, but especially here on HN most people are definitely not. If you make $200k cash plus RSUs on top of that you may not be rich but you're certainly on your way there and you're certainly not middle class in the way that carpenter making $75k with his stay at home wife in Houston is.
I was just curious what separates the "middle" from the "bottom".
But what separates the middle from the lower?
Property. Historically, this meant land. Today, it means assets. Savings of any kind. The poor live pay check to pay check; the middle class could survive a bad harvest.
This makes sense to me. Owning things at all makes you middle class, and not destitute. Why is this distinction important?
The safety buffer it provides lets you take more risk, personally, civically and societally. That lets you access rewards someone fighting for sustenance can’t countenance. Consider the years we, as a society, spend educating our youth when they could be working a field to produce food.
It also means leverage. If a harvest failed, the poor in the army got fed. The others didn’t. The middle class, on the other hand, wasn’t forced into that choice simply to survive. (We use the term “survive” nowadays to mean maintain some arbitrary quality of life, but I’m speaking literally.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class
Roughly, today middle class is directly related to the amount of discretionary income, not assets.
Broadly, what constitutes a middle class depends on the society we are observing. Every society has its elites. Some had slaves, some have destitutes. In between is gradation defined, variously, by income, assets, education and lineage. (See the history section; modern/British middle class was originally defined by education.)
In America, discretionary income is a good definition because most people have a reasonable expectation of lifelong economic stability. (We gripe when it isn’t improving.) In Europe (and most of the world), the asset test is far more sturdy. And even within America, you see this vary.
Did you read the history and evolution of the term section?
“Friedrich Engels saw the category as an intermediate social class between the nobility and the peasantry in late-feudalist society. While the nobility owned much of the countryside, and the peasantry worked it, a new bourgeoisie (literally "town-dwellers") arose around mercantile functions in the city.” In the French Revolution, “the new ruling class or bourgeoisie in the new capitalist-dominated societies.” Capital, it’s there in the term. The Stevenson definition, which follows in the next paragraph, cites the “chief defining characteristic of membership in the middle-class [as] control of significant human capital.” This British education-and-skill-derived definition is the basis of the top-of-the-article summary definition, since that human capital produces excess income.
Would note that the article appears poorly cited (as many notes on it claim), despite a cursory review of the bibliography shows they’ve covered the basics.
And there are plenty of the very rich who go bankrupt and die penniless.
Someone relying solely on income from labour to sustain their standard of living may live as the middle class do, just as a poor person accumulating debt may sustain a middle-class lifestyle, but that doesn’t change their fundamental economic situation.
Also: When middle class folk talk about living paycheck to paycheck, they’re usually ignoring retirement assets. But I don’t deny that plenty of people consume their economic security because they, and many times rightly, don’t believe they need it.