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.
Will try to put something longer in later, but I haven’t seen a mention of “working class” as something distinct from “middle class”. In 20th century America the former were aspiring to move up to the latter, for their children if not themselves. Working class families would sometimes (often?) have wives doing some kind of wage work to add to household income, middle class meant the wives got to stay home with the kids.
To the bitter resentment of a guy named Trump. But no matter what you think of the filthy rich, they got this one right: he’s got less class than even the average for the lower class (however defined).
cool points. I’m particularly interested in how those definitions work out in Asia. Post WWII, there was a notion Ichi-oku Sō-chūryū(一億総中流 or 100 million strong middle class) and surveys consistently had (and still have!) 90% of respondents say they were middle class, even though about 40% no longer have regular (i.e. lifetime) employment. The situation in China is also interesting, in that you have Tier 1-4 cities, so that a salary that provides a relatively comfortable living in a Tier 4 city like Choqquing would barely cover rent and living expenses in a Tier 1 city like Beijing or Shanghai.
I’m not sure I agree that public identification is what’s important.
My father was a carpenter, but I’m pretty sure my parents considered themselves middle class. (Might have something to do with them both being college educated.) But I don’t recall them thinking it was important to be middle class. Certainly it was of no importance to them how others regarded them. Being middle class was just how things were, like having blue eyes or living in California or something.
By the time Dad retired, they could do things like taking vacations in England; so not really close to the edge. But no interest in being considered “rich” or “upper class”.
The public/private distinction is there to establish context and purpose. I’m less concerned with how people view themselves when making individual judgments than I am about what narratives they make use of to get there in their self-identification, and how they negotiate the shared part of that identity when it comes to creating public meaning.
If I’m a carpenter who sees myself as middle class, do I see myself and my interests as most closely allied with the upper class who give me access to capital and who contract with me to give me work, or do I see myself and my interests as being more closely allied with my worker (if any), or with others who have valuable work to offer to society, but who are constrained by their lack of easy access to capital to expand abilities and opportunity, or to survive affordability crises that the rich view mostly as stock fluctuations which can be exploited whichever direction they go in?
How I see myself affects my vote. How I speak to others when negotiating that shared identity shifts whole sections of the vote in aggregate.
It’s like the difference between micro- and macro-economics. I’m arguing the macro side of identity.
A quick search reveals I clearly grew up in an upper middle class household, my family moved to Tallahassee in 1968 when my dad was hired as a professor at FSU, to start the academic year (we moved in the summer). His starting salary was $18,000, which according to this:
https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1969/demographics/p60-65.pdf
put us in the top 12.8% of households. And there were resources/benefits from my mother’s parents that enhanced life experiences above that basic income level (e.g. there was the 1950-vintage beachfront cottage in Mexico Beach that my maternal grandfather bought around when it was built, so regular trips to the beach in the summer and on weekends near the beginning or end of school year were “normal”, just something we expected to be able to do).
A curiosity is the German terminology. It’s Arbeiterklasse (working class), Mittelstand (middle estate) and Oberschicht (upper layer).
Mittelklasse (middle class) usually refers to medium sized cars.
Oberschicht is contrasted with Unterschicht (under/below/lower layer) which would cover lower working class and below (in the modern era;
in premodern times it would be patricians vs. plebeians).
Riffing on Hartmut’s comment here. I think he suggests an important point, and not just for the German case.
Perhaps it would be useful to expand the discussion a bit to this: What classes (in addition to “middle class”) do we have? What do we call them? What characteristics do they have?
To take one obvious case, do we have a group called “lower class” or “poor” or “working class” or something else? Are those different labels for essentially the same group? Or significantly different, albeit perhaps overlapping, groups. And are there other groups which need to be added in order to cover the whole population?
A similar question could be asked about the other end of the socioeconomic (or cultural or whatever) spectrum. How we define the rest of the population seems likely to have a significant impact on how we define “middle class.”
I saw a politically conservative friend’s shared social-media post from someone (don’t remember the name) with “MD” after his name (they know everything, of course – and no one would simply stick those letters in the name on their profile just to look authoritative) analyzing the distribution of wealth in the US in a way that resulted in the “middle class” holding something like 92% of the nation’s wealth. The ultimate point was that taxing billionaires wasn’t going to do much about the national debt or some such nonsense.
Herein lies the rub – this guy defined the middle class as those not in the bottom 50% in net worth but also who are not billionaires. So, according to him, someone like Tom Brady, who is worth a mere $300+ million, is middle class. And people bought it – people who were likely in the actual middle class (or at least much closer to it from below, depending on the definition).
It would be interesting to see how much of the wealth held by Dr. MD’s version of the middle class was held by those worth more than $5M as opposed to those worth less. I imagine his analysis would be less compelling without the $5M+ middle-classers included.
Tom Brady might be upset about finding out he’s not just a regular guy, Joe Sixpack, average fella.
trying to force old European classifications onto a society that has nothing to do with titles or stations is not going to work well.
but we try anyway.
the problem is that there are multiple dimensions by which you can categorize people: income, spending, wealth/savings, prospects, potential access to family wealth, lifestyle, attitude, etc.. and they all play a part in determining whether a person is “rich” or “poor” or somewhere in between. we can’t just draw lines or bands in one or two of the easily-quantifiable dimensions and expect to get a nice grouping. the other dimensions play a role, too, and some of them are not so quantifiable. and we won’t agree about which dimensions should be included or where the lines should be drawn and how fuzzy they can be.
so at best we end up talking about a multi-dimensional blob where some of the edges are fuzzy or not even agreed-upon. and we can’t visualize such a thing.
“middle class” is a fuzzy blob that means “not rich* and not poor**”
* – see appendix C
** – see appendix D
[Trigger warning -AI generated.]
“Socioeconomic (social) classes are the main categories people living in the United States are typically sorted into. These are hierarchical groupings based primarily on wealth, income, education, occupation, and sometimes lifestyle or social networks. There is no single official definition—sociologists and researchers use competing models, boundaries are debated, and some question whether discrete classes even exist as rigid categories. Most agree that American society is stratified along these lines.”
…
“People in the United States are commonly classified into socioeconomic strata ranging from a small upper/capitalist elite through expanding professional and middle segments to working and lower groups. These categories are useful for describing patterns of resources, opportunity, and power. Still, they overlap extensively because the underlying measures are continuous, people move, multiple dimensions of status exist simultaneously, and lived experience is shaped by more than income alone.”
US Socioeconomic Classes and Overlaps
If the only thing known about Warren Buffett and Elon Musk were their lifestyles, the impression would be that their wealth is a tiny fraction of what it actually is.
These terms mean something a bit different in England, and probably in the rest of Europe.
Upper class: We have family money. I don’t have to work. My parents didn’t have to work.
Middle class: Well-educated, and it wouldn’t matter much if I didn’t get paid next month.
But I’ve overstated the financial aspect. It’s more an attitude of mind.
From what I heard/read the New Deal and the boom resulting from WW2 created a general impression that being working class no longer meant being near starvation most of the time and that a single (male) breadwinner per household was sufficient for a standard of living that was not abject poverty, i.e. one full-time job would pay for food, housing and clothing. Any effort beyond that was the way to middle class but one would have little problems to make (basic) ends meet with a single solid job, which would be available to anyone looking for it. Not that this was necessarily true (and clearly not for POC) but it was at least believable. So, poverty could be seen as a result of not putting in any effort (=laziness) as opposed to earlier times when being a mere worker was more or less equal to being poor (‘working’ poor thus being a tautology). But times have changed and these days many a family can make ends meet barely or not really at all with working several full-time jobs in parallel and both parents and older children contributing. Thus we have a ‘new working poor’ class while in particular the Right still propagates the idea of poor=lazy. As a result, or so it seems to me, those who do not live paycheck to paycheck get the impression that they have achieved middle class status, although only precariously. And, looking at the new class of ultra-rich, the lower entry limit for the upper class (and thus the upper limit to middle class) is now felt to be at levels that until fairly recently would have counted as unmistakably rich (although not filthily so). So, those at the lower end cling to the old status despite de facto having sunk to working class with just white collar to hide it, while those further up cannot believe to have risen beyond because these days a million is a rounding error for the true elites.
If the premise is behavior, I think it is behavior that reflects significant discretionary income, whether it is used on travel, a vacation home, hobbies, collectibles, guns, post-secondary ed, sporting events, concerts, etc. People do many different things with their discretionary income. I came from a large family (7 kids) and while my father made good income (top 12.8% according to that link Priest shared), my mom was at home, we had a family cabin (modest and purchased for about a year’s salary then and with a mortgage), we did a lot of camping/rafting and we took long family vacations (from Alaska to the lower 48) every other year or so. To me, that’s solid middle class behavior. And it ate up all the discretionary income so my parents didn’t save much until us kids were older (also solid middle class behavior when kids are involved).
I agree with you, lj, about many middle class being one health care crises away from losing it all. Putting that aside for the moment, it is interesting to me that both major political parties appear to be arguing about a hollowed-out middle class. My own perception is that the upper middle class and lower upper class/Rich have grown considerably and there have been gains on the lower middle class as well. I read this study a while back on whether or not the middle class has been hollowed out and it has a lot of interesting data. Yes, it’s AEI. So shoot me.
https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-because-of-a-booming-upper-middle-class/
These terms mean something a bit different in England, and probably in the rest of Europe.
More than a bit different, at least traditionally. In England until recently your class was defined by your father’s (!) profession, and to some extent where you went to school (not university). And in Europe maybe even more so. Even now, you are absolutely not considered to be upper class (at least by the unambiguously upper class) no matter how rich you are, if your background does not fit. That doesn’t mean that impoverished aristos don’t suck up to you however!
I have started to try and define or describe the English classes a couple of times in the last day or so, but it is just too complicated, and anyway it is changing. Suffice to say, both here and in Europe, even now it seems very different indeed from America, and as Pro Bono says, it is not necessarily all that much to do with the financial aspect.
Even in the US, the financial aspect isn’t the whole deal by any means. Trump was rich (if you didn’t have access to the books), but nobody in NYC would consider him upper class. Not even for an instant. It infuriates hom, but they knew lack of class when they saw it.
I suspect it’s the same with Musk, actually. Sure, he’s got more money than anybody. But taste? Culture? Class? A resounding No! He simply doesn’t have what it takes. Money van buy a lot, but it can’t buy good taste in what you buy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/us/politics/supreme-court-trump-mail-ballots.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20260824&instance_id=180870&nl=breaking-news®i_id=130173461&segment_id=225350&user_id=440e532a5e2b8bee83bffdbd8fb9f2e7
Fuck America.
Talking about the US vs the UK reminds me of defining upper class as not having to buy your silver. On the other hand, the reaction to nepo babies seems to be a very US sort of reflex.
One thing that is visually apparent, but that I did not point out, regarding those 1968 Commerce dept. numbers, is how relatively compressed the different income groupings are. Such that a 10% change in household income one way or the other changes what percentile you’re in significantly. That is very much not the case today, as one can easily check if you go to one of the household income percentile calculator sites.
“Summary: Wealth creation is not inherently zero-sum: fortunes can grow through innovation, investment, and expanding prosperity rather than by taking from others. Yet human psychology remains highly sensitive to relative status, often valuing rank over absolute gains and even accepting personal losses to reduce perceived inequality. This tendency can misclassify productive success as exploitation, turning economic comparisons into moral and political conflict.”
Why Humans Care More About Rank Than Riches: Wealth Isn’t Zero-Sum. Status Is.
To me, “middle class” in the US is primarily an economic category.
If you are financially independent in the sense of not having to work if you don’t want to, you are not middle class. You are upper class.
If you work but you can’t make enough to securely and reliably pay for essentials – food, clothing, housing, utilities, transportation – you are not middle class. You are lower class, or less perjoratively, working poor. Or just poor, working or not.
Everyone in between those categories is middle class. It seems to me.
There are folks who make a whole lot of money – highly compensated professionals like doctors, lawyers, etc. – and who are middle class by my definition, but most folks would consider them upper class, mostly because they can afford a lifestyle similar to folks who are truly financially independent. They probably are upper class – “having to work” in their case is mostly a matter of continuing to support their lifestyle. If you “have to work” because you have (or could have) enough capital to live on but you can’t imagine life without multiple homes and very expensive hobbies, you’re upper class.
There are also people who are basically outside of all of these categories – people who are, for whatever reason, incapable of working or working steadily enough to even come close to getting by. People with mental illness or substance abuse issues, for example, or people who are just too freaking weird to accommodate in a normal work environment. Folks like this are basically indigent, and we do a very very poor job of taking care of them. There are more of them than you might think.
“middle class” is as well defined as the “middle ages”.
Or perhaps “middle age”.
When I was teaching, we teachers had an understanding of class based on broad categories of kid behavior and parent behavior:
Aggrieved, paranoid, defensive/aggressive, very concerned about maintaining respect, depressed, anxious.
Mean in a smart way, entitled, competitive and selfish, often lazy, given to bullying behavior behind a polite veneer.
Reasonably competent at life, accepts responsibility for behavior and foresees logical consequences.
These broad descriptors corresponded pretty well to neighborhoods which corresponded pretty well to parental income.
wonkie, care to share what income levels these three groups represent? I mean, I could guess. But that only reflects my personal prejudices, after all.
wjca I don’t really know in terms of money. I know in terms of material goods and presence or absence of parents.
As far as I know, we didn’t have any seriously rich people with kids enrolled in public school.
We had families on welfare or surviving barely from one paycheck to the next and living with chronic instability–always moving from one apartment to another, always changing jobs, the kind of life where a car breaking down or the parent getting sick is a crisis. Christmas is a crisis. Typically, one parent who didn’t come to school except for crisis situations.
The families with 2 or more new cars and big suburban houses where every child has their own bedroom and has lots and lots of stuff. Often four parents with white collar careers so the child has two houses, two bedrooms, and two accumulations of stuff. College expectations for sure. All four parents show up for parent conferences.
Live in an older section of town–the area that was a suburb back in the day but now has big trees and attractively vintage houses. College educated parents or parents work for one of the good paying unions (Longshore, Teamsters). Most parents own a house and one car per parent. Usually, standard nuclear family but some variations.
I knew the lower income families the best.