by liberal japonicus
First of all, with all the doom scrolling I do, I’ve gotten a lot worse about keeping track of where I see things. so I don’t have the links to these anecdotes. Bearing that in mind, the question of what is middle class surfaced in the demography post, and I thought it was worth a discussion.
One anecdote was an interview with Mamdani where she wants Mamdani to set a salary that defines the middle class. Mamdani doesn’t take the bait, because everyone is hunting around for soundbites that can undercut anything that he is doing in New York.
This sort of lines up with wj’s question about how to classify retired people. He wrote at minimum that needs to be modified for those who are retired. Did I magically shift from middle class to upper class when I retired? After all, I started living on my savings and investments, rather than on a paycheck…
The standard definition of middle class is two-thirds to double the median national income, though there have been several articles that take issue with that. The Brookings Institute argues that a percentile definition where 60% of the population would be better. If middle class is supposed to be a measure of financial stability, it seems to me that the poor provision of health insurance guarantees that virtually no one is middle class, in that they are all one medical emergency away from losing it all.
I understand that we make the assumption that classes are supposed to represent the entirety of a population, but to me, it seems that the middle class is defined more by behavior than by anything related to money. Thus, the retiree doesn’t shift from middle to upper if they keep their same basic habits.
As an example, here in Japan, we have quite a few Asian tourists and a large number of them are families, two parents, children and sometimes a grandparent or two. A lot of my Japanese students tell me about travelling with their parents, though high school and university entrance prep can often reduce the window to the early teens, reopening after university entrance. The big difference is that when my brother and I took those trips, we were always bored and not particularly interested, but the asian kids don’t seem to behave in the same way. That, or they keep their feelings much more under wraps.
My wife, on the other hand, is the daughter of a rice farmer and when I asked if they took any family trips, she just laughed at the ridiculousness of the question.
If you are willing to grant my premise, what other behaviors are ‘middle-class’? Thoughts?
Mean in a smart way, entitled, competitive and selfish, often lazy, given to bullying behavior behind a polite veneer.
That sounds like a lot of kids in our school district, including a couple families right across the street. I always wondered if they saw themselves in the villians in teen movies.
My local paper offers up an article today on the 10 cities where it is most expensive to be “middle class.” Possibly no surprise that, except for Bellview, Washington (#9), they are in California. With 1-8 in Northern California.
Just one example: San Francisco (#3):
The mind boggles!
This is from today’s Times, about the fact that the government “is giving class a status within the equalities framework, reflecting the belief that it remains one of Britain’s most stubborn forms of disadvantage”:
Apart from the weather, tea and queueing, perhaps our greatest national hobby is working out what class everyone is. We don’t ask, obviously — that would be mortifying. We just gather evidence: shoes, vowels, whether the bag for life says Waitrose or Lidl, even though that tells you nothing, since we all shop at both.
It used to be simpler. Watch an episode of Fawlty Towers now and the joke feels almost quaint: Basil, straining every sinew towards a gentility he could never afford, mortified by anyone who might expose Torquay, and by extension himself, for what it really was.
Class, in 1975, was a costume, but at least it had a fixed, legible uniform. You could read a man quickly back then. The accent, the blazer, the tie, and not just any tie, but the old school tie, worn like a season ticket to a club whose whole point was that most people weren’t in it. It told you where he’d been educated, who his father probably was, and roughly how he’d vote, all in two inches of polyester stripe.
People are harder to read these days. Yet Bridget Phillipson is giving class a status within the equalities framework, reflecting the belief that it remains one of Britain’s most stubborn forms of disadvantage. A new government unit is being set up to study class and socioeconomic inequality specifically. It’s an idea that’s already been described as potentially “messy” and “patronising”.
Naturally, the people of Britain will respond in the only way we know how: by immediately arguing, messily and patronisingly, about what class actually is. But here’s the trouble: class is ever less a socioeconomic category and more a psychological condition. A man can own three rental properties, earn £280,000 a year, and insist he’s “basically working class” because his old man once drove a van. A woman on £28,000, who lives in one of those rentals, can feel — reluctantly, because it’s not the vibe she wants — middle class simply because she likes olives.
The problem is that class refuses to behave like mathematics. You’d imagine it should be straightforward: income, education, occupation. Pop those into an online tool and get an answer. Yet it never works. Well, maybe sometimes at the extremes. I can see Prince George posing at Eton and say “I reckon that young chap’s upper class” with some confidence. But beyond that, things quickly become murky.
The physical evidence doesn’t help much either. The things that used to give the game away no longer tell you very much at all, because increasingly nothing is paid for outright. You no longer need real money for a decent car, just a personal contract purchase (PCP) deal and a direct debit. We don’t own anything, but we’ve got everything on subscription so we’re reduced to working out well-to-do-ness by what sort of mug someone drinks from.
While the traditional classes merge, snobbery still thrives. The real fun is in the middle, where a quiet civil war rages between two of the most identifiable kinds. There’s the “posh” middle class: Farrow & Ball walls, a chocolate labrador called Bunty with its own gilet, strong opinions about sourdough starters. Then there’s the “common” middle class: grey tracksuits and Turkey teeth, grey new-build with artificial grass, a French bulldog (also grey) called Zeus, the word “bosh”. Both sides have whacking great mortgages. Both went to university with two Ds and an E to study something useless. Both fly Ryanair. Both look down on each other, and neither could tell you with any clarity what separates them, apart from taste.
And the middle keeps growing, quietly annexing both ends as it goes, rather like Greater London (even Reading is now connected to the Tube), there’s now “the Greater Middle Class”. The old aristocracy gets sucked down into it, and the working classes get promoted one Ocado order at a time. Give it another generation and there’ll be nobody in Britain left outside the middle at all — just everyone driving around in brand-new rented electric SUVs on their way to Oliver Bonas.
Of course, the great British class diagnostic question remains what your parents did. “He was a bus driver” is said by someone who wants you to know that even though they’re a barrister handing you a plate of nduja focaccia at their dinner party in Islington, they’re actually working class. Whereas “he worked in transport” means they’re either for some reason embarrassed about the bus driver thing, or their dad is Sir Richard Branson — but you won’t know, because you won’t ask a follow-up (that would be rude), so you’ll just say “ah, OK lovely” and stuff your mouth with greasy bread.
And does it really make any difference what a person’s parents did? If your father was a toolmaker but you run a country, does that make you working class too? It probably doesn’t seem like it to most onlookers. Modern jobs make class even harder to pin on people. Once, someone’s father worked at the shipyard, or he owned it — simple enough. Now papa is a brand consultant who works from home doing socials for a jacket potato food van franchise, and he has a kitchen island, but owes the bank a great deal of money — so what class box does that go in?
Even food has become impossible to categorise. A pie was once reliably working class, until the gastropubs got hold of it. Now the same pie arrives on a wooden board for £23, with a small Kilner jar of homemade piccalilli and a waiter who can tell you which local artisan farm supplied the micro-carrots. Is that micro-carrot farmer working class or not? Who knows. Better ask them how they feel.
And that’s why it’s complicated for a Whitehall unit to start separating people by class, however well-meaning, because you cannot fill in a form for a feeling. You can measure income, but class is an identity, and once identity is involved, facts and figures go out of the window. As a nation, we’ll carry on doing what we’ve always done: eyeing up someone’s trainers, listening to their vowels, piecing together an increasingly abstract puzzle. So perhaps those in charge would be wiser to talk strictly of profit and loss, rather than class, or, as warned, it could get very messy indeed.
I heard, don’t recall where, years ago, that one ‘class distinction’ was whether you put the cream in your tea (then stirred)=upper class, or put some cream in the cup, then added tea (no stirring required)=lower/mid class.
Seems to me the latter is more efficient.
And it isn’t as if it’s something like “add water to acid vs add acid to water” where doing it wrong could give catastrophic results.
Snarki, that is absolutely correct. Although, for any class here, it would be milk, never cream.
When I was growing up there were many, many linguistic (and other) signifiers, mostly obsolete now. Interestingly, that Times piece talks about e.g. cars and clothes etc, whereas in my youth that was never part of it. In fact, in some ways it was inverted: the joke was you could always tell who the Duke was if you were being shown around a stately home, he would be the one messing about in frayed tweed trousers and moth-eaten sweaters or jackets.
Milk in first was in times past thought to be frightfully, how can one put it, miffy.
It seems like the first step ought to be establishing some facts about the purported disadvantage.
Is it economic? Is it access to education? Is it just a matter of what your marriage prospects are? Something else? “Disadvantaged” is simply too vague to be useful on its own.
Then you can ask, what criteria are used, in practice, to establish class for the purpose of giving/withholding advantage? As noted, that may be challenging. Especially as the criteria may differ, both depending on who is doing the classification and on the particular discrimination involved.**
I suppose there are worse ways to waste government time and money.
** I have seen cases, here in supposedly less heirarchical America, where someone could be a respected and admired business associate, but considered simply unthinkable as a prospective spouse.
What about NOT mixing milk with tea?
I prefer my tea (plain with no added aromas like bergamot etc.) with just sugar (increasingly less; compared to me as a kid about a third or quarter).
what about not even adding sugar?
That would make me Chinese 😉
The question(s) should rather be: sugar in cubes or loose, white or brown, beet or cane…? Artificial sweeteners in hot beverages (shudder!) should be kept out of polite conversations.
Fixed that for you.
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According to Grok.
UK Social Classes Venn Diagram
Grok’s Venn diagram seems highly misleading to me, in that it represents the upper, middle, and working class with ellipses of equal size, when according to the Great British Class Survey from which the data was taken, the elite class was only about 6% of the population, the established middle class was 25%, and the traditional working class was 14% of the total.
Meanwhile, there’s also a Technical Middle Class (6%), New Affluent Workers (15%), Emergent Service Workers (19%), and the Precariat (15%).
Whatever the case, the Upper Class is nowhere near a third of the overall population, and the Middle Class, while largest, has much more economic overlap with the Working Class than with the Upper Class.
I’m not even sure where Grok got that area of triple overlap from, unless it was taken from the secondary sources commenting on the survey. Whatever the case, it looks sketchy to me.
All of the above numbers were taken from: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0038038513481128
I don’t think that a Venn Diagram is the right choice for how to represent these groups most productively. What you really have here are three axes (Cultural Capital, Economic Capital, Social Capital) with a representation of size and of relative position on all three axes – something more like a 3d Bubble Plot would be most informative.
Also worth noting here, the Traditional Working Class, Emergent Service Workers, and Precariat make up 48% of the population – all with moderately poor to poor economic capital.
The New Affluent Workers look to be the Middle Class equivalent of the Precariat – making it, but at risk of falling back, and the Technical Middle Class are doing okay financially, but are not well integrated on the social or cultural level, and thus could also find themselves shut out of the elite end of the pool during trying times.
Last note – the study was done in 2011. A whole helluvalot has changed since then and I’d expect to see that both the Technical Middle Class and the New Affluent Workers have lost ground, and that the Established Middle Class has shrunk some as well. And I’d expect to find that the Elite has grown slightly above its 6%, but that its share of economic capital has grown more, while the economic capital of all the other groups has fallen.
Also, I took the Great British Class Survey mini-poll on the Internet Archive and it said that I would be high social and cultural capital and fairly high economic capital (savings for a downpayment on a house if we ever live somewhere with rational real estate) by 2012 UK standards. That may be true, but only on the coattails of sheer good fortune. The majority of my friends and colleagues are in the middle class precariat – in debt, renting, and underemployed in the gig economy.
This is amusing:
https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3mvlae4v5yc2l
Fun quote; “…their methodology would classify someone making $150k as working class if they don’t have a college degree, but someone making 50k who has a college degree isn’t.”
as the famous demographer, David Byrne, once noted: “facts all come with points of view”
However social class is defined, it means something different from “income band”.
In England, social class is a combination of hereditary privilege, wealth, and education. Income barely comes into it. Most of the commentators here would be seen as middle class, and I don’t need to know your financial status to say so.
It’s hard for me to imagine a reasonable class scheme under which I’m not middle class. I’m about the middle-classiest person as you’ll ever meet. Silly wording aside, I’m entirely serious about that.
In England, social class is a combination of hereditary privilege, wealth, and education. Income barely comes into it.
This is absolutely true. And even an eventual lack of wealth, while still retaining the relevant connections, can still leave someone as unmistakably upper class (or upper middle class). I realise this makes it difficult for many non Brits to understand, but of course it emphasises the importance of so-called “social capital”.
Bilbo Baggins gained in riches but lost his respectability in the Shire as a result of his adventure.
Yeah, I don’t know where I would fit in the UK class system. We teach at a major university and I have a Ph.D., but both my family and my wife’s family are working class (though her father was a military officer). I’m guessing that would situate us as middle class with high cultural capital, but shaky economic and social capital. No kids, so there’s no worry about how our household success would affect the status of my siblings or children.
We’ve done well, given our roots.
Class consciousness in England is very annoying, ridiculous and holding the country back. It is poisoning in many aspects of society.
The optimistic message of the recently concluded “7 Up” series, a groundbreaking longitudinal documentary that initially tried to investigate the impact of class on the development of its subjects, is to my mind that family and love are much more important than anything else:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/sep/15/70-up-review-itv1-itvx
novakant, I watched the first episode of 70 Up last night. I find (and have always found) the series very moving, and I mostly agree with you about the optimistic message. The selection of the kids is one of the most extraordinary parts for me; it really shows what was considered uncontroversially “normal” in 1964.
It’s also rather moving that they (understandably) weren’t going to do 70 Up after Apted died, but that the dying Nick Hitchon contacted them because he wanted to do a last interview. For all its faults, the whole series (all 7 instalments) is a remarkable achievement.