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.