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?
Middle class is a weird and fuzzy concept that is a mix of wealth and respectability. I don’t think either is sufficient on its own to delineate who is, or is not, middle class. I think in practice what we mean by middle class is “not independently wealthy.”
When I think of what it means to be independently wealthy, what I usually think of is someone who, if their household were to cash in all of their investments and all personal property save a modest primary residence, would have enough wealth saved to get them through their retirement without having to apply for government assistance. That’s not sustaining your current lifestyle wealthy, but it is having enough of a cushion to be able to keep a roof over your head, food on the table, and health care coverage for your household. You could stop putting out effort and coast through on savings, even though that would require scaling back your lifestyle to something more in line with the lower middle class.
The upper end of this category gets complicated because there are so many upper middle class households who have leveraged their ability to sustain their household security in order to try to secure independent wealth – think a surgeon or lawyer who has more house and more social and lifestyle expenses than they can afford, and who have taken on debt to maintain those thing at the risk of their long-term security. I think if these sorts have more social ties to the independently wealthy than to the rest of us, then they are probably more “working rich” than they are middle class. They have social access to capital for second chances that is not available to someone without those social ties.
Something like this. It’s the best stab I can do at it in a first draft off the top of my head, and nobody else was feeding grist into the mill…
All of this is fine, but doesn’t solve the two biggest practical problems with our politics — what do we do at the policy level to put financial security back into more hands and put home ownership, retirement, and elder care back within reach of the middle class without taking that security from the next generation? And how do we tell stories about these decisions while seeking elected office in order to counter all of the propaganda and disinformation put out by the wealthy to perpetuate their gains at the expense of everyone else in society?
Having a definition of who we mean doesn’t fix the problem or fix the narrative that empowers the problem.
Those three dense paragraphs above are going to cause most voters to tune out within three sentences, and the few that do keep going are going to spend most of their time arguing with bits of it rather than finding some sort of common cause out of it.
Solidarity is hard. So many seams. So many wedges.
I think it’s probably necessary to start by asking: What are we going to use the definition for? That will inform the first dichotomy: are we looking for some kind of objective criteria, or are we interested in which groups of people consider themselves to be middle class.
The former might be used, for example, when crafting a government program, whereas the latter would be used politically in selling (or opposing) a program to the voters. Something like the question asked of Mamdani amounts to asking for the first kind of definition in order to attack for the second kind of purpose.
For a third use, consider an academic looking to describe the population, as part of a discussion about an observed economic or sociological phenomena. That could be either objective, subjective, or some mix of the two.
In short, the usual usage is just way too mushy to be useful (outside demagoguery).
It used to be so easy: One enters Middle Class from below once one can permanently employ at least one domestic servant.
The upper end was never as well defined once a title of nobility was no longer necessary to become Upper Class. Upper Class was imo always a club that needed admission by members. Just being filthy rich was not sufficient as long as the other members (often “old money”) did not recognize a person as belonging.
That second question is further complicated by what the people identifying as middle class are hoping to achieve for themselves with that public identification.
The person who considers themself middle class who is worried about losing their house due to affordability concerns is going to have a different set of policy priorities than a working rich person who considers themself middle class who is less worried about affordability and more worried about how to move up into the upper class.
I think in European politics the middle class think more about the former, where in US politics a big chunk of the middle class sees themselves as thwarted upper class success stories.
That’s a hard gap to bridge, and a hard divide to navigate if you are looking to win an election and need money to do that.