Many of the places that LOST the most middle class also seem to have a big RISE in UPPER class. At least it looks like that from the map. Am I reading that wrong? Can we interpret that to mean at least some middle class went up? I guess the word "Shrinking" here is assumed to mean "Gone Down" but at least some of that Went Up, didn't it? I can't seem to figure out from looking at this.
Where the Middle Class Is Shrinking
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Re: Where the Middle Class Is Shrinking
#32I used to think that science fiction's popular predictions of a dominant, out of touch urban ruling class casually oppressing subsistence level, serf-like rural populations was just a dystopian fantasy. But the older I get and the more I think about the future and human nature the more I think that may be the way we are headed.
The joke is that the rural people are oppressing themselves. "Urban elites" have long advocated for policies that would benefit the rural poor but the white rural poor are dead set against any policy that would also benefit black people. http://www.nber.org/papers/w17234 and http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-Amer... for more on that.
Re: Where the Middle Class Is Shrinking
#33Anyone able to offer an explaination of why having a large middle class is viewed as positive? For example, say large population was happy, educated, healthy, etc. - why does it matter what the class distribution is?
> Anyone able to offer an explaination of why having a large middle class is viewed as positive?
In the traditional view espoused by many advocates of capitalism, the traditional "middle class" (those living by a mix of capital and labor, either applying their own labor to their own capital as small business owners or yeoman farmers, or by having both capital to which other's rented labor is applied and labor which they rent to others -- i.e, an upper-income wage laborer with some personal real estate and financial investments) is idealized; I'm not sure if there is a substantive reason for this so much as a PR one, though -- its something that the working class can somewhat understandably (even if not always plausibly) aspire to and the existing middle class can identify with. But, if you look at most of the criticisms of capitalism, they mostly focus on the problems that exist in the relationship between the capitalist class and the working class, so the more of the population that is in the middle class -- which is both less subject to exploitation than the working class and less capable of it than the capitalist class -- the less the problems associated with capitalism are.
Note, however, while this idealization of the "middle class" remains in the US, the definition of middle class in many media uses (including this article and the supporting research) has drifted to refer to a range around the "middle income", which is very different from the traditional concept of middle class; most of the people in this band are firmly in the working class, with only the top-end of most median-income-centered definitions of "middle class" containing people that are plausibly in the traditional middle class.
Re: Where the Middle Class Is Shrinking
#34I used to think that science fiction's popular predictions of a dominant, out of touch urban ruling class casually oppressing subsistence level, serf-like rural populations was just a dystopian fantasy. But the older I get and the more I think about the future and human nature the more I think that may be the way we are headed.
That condition is quite normal in an empirical sense. It is how almost all civilizations in the world have been structured for almost all of history.
The conditions of the past 200 years -- mass urbanization driven by the Industrial Revolution, and then the post-industrial service economy -- are both highly anomalous, a brief, tiny outlier in the vast historical data.
Re: Where the Middle Class Is Shrinking
#35The article makes the extremely common media error (which is also present in the source research, or at least the press release from Pew announcing it -- the article uses "class" pretty exclusively, the Pew release uses "class" in the headline and much of the body, but also uses "income tier" in some places) of conflating income (which is simply a measure of the amount of money received per year) with class (which is…
Every time there's an article like this, this exact comment gets trotted out.
Phrases can have two meanings, that you can determine by context.
Re: Where the Middle Class Is Shrinking
#36I'm not quite understanding why the "Lower Class" trends seem to be so flat, while the middle income trends are down. Where are the middle income families going if not the lower income bracket?
I believe what you are seeing is the white middle class dying off.
Re: Where the Middle Class Is Shrinking
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the specific number matters too much. As long as the number was consistent in the survey, the point is made.
i think it matters a lot. every few thousand you move that line in either direction is going to make a large direct impact on the apparent 'growth' or 'decline' on either side of it.
The only number that actually matters here is "median household income". The distance away on both sides doesn't matter, because the article is analyzing movement away from the center.
Does it matter if you're capturing the middle 20% or the middle 60% of the country? Not really. There are fewer people in the "middle", for some definition of middle.
Re: Where the Middle Class Is Shrinking
#38Anyone able to offer an explaination of why having a large middle class is viewed as positive? For example, say large population was happy, educated, healthy, etc. - why does it matter what the class distribution is?
From personal experience, countries with extreme income distributions have a wide host of problems; from political unstability and civil wars to poverty and disease.
Almost all third-world countries are like this.
Re: Where the Middle Class Is Shrinking
#39i'm not sure $125k/year for a family of 3 should really be considered 'upper class'. is 2 working parents barely making 60k each really upper class? i would like to see these numbers for 4x or 5x the median (roughly $250k/year). to me that's really where the delta in income starts to become apparent as manifested in lifestyle choices and accumulated wealth. edit: okay, reading the actual research reveals that pew cal…
If you live in San Jose - no. If you live in Modesto - yes.
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Re: Where the Middle Class Is Shrinking
#40i'm not sure $125k/year for a family of 3 should really be considered 'upper class'. is 2 working parents barely making 60k each really upper class? i would like to see these numbers for 4x or 5x the median (roughly $250k/year). to me that's really where the delta in income starts to become apparent as manifested in lifestyle choices and accumulated wealth. edit: okay, reading the actual research reveals that pew cal…
If you live in San Jose - no. If you live in Modesto - yes.
While the NYT article omits this in the description of what the numbers are based on, the source it is drawn from (and which is linked in the article) indicates that the per-metro figures are computed after adjusting for metro-area cost of living. Which should correct somewhat for inter-region variations, but also makes the definition of "middle class" very weird, even as income-based definitions of "class" go.