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Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

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Re: Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

#31

Post by dragonwriter »

ixtli wrote: post #27
crushcrashcrush wrote: post #8

I have a real, honest to goodness question. I live in the Bay Area. I make $200,000 a year. I just had a mini-exit where I netted about $300K after taxes. I still rent for $2700/month. I don't want to buy an overpriced home in the bay in the suburbs (I wish we had for-sale condos like Toronto everywhere... still don't know why) I do well. I'm 32. I'm on an upwards path. But I don't feel upper class. I feel middle cla…

So the marxist line is that you dont feel upper class because you're not! I mean by some older definitions you're not even really middle class. The "orthodox" explanation of this is that if you own land you're middle class, if you profit off of it (e.g.: if you rent anything like land or people) then you're upper class. (The terms here are petite bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie.) It's clear to me that you definitely shou…

“Capital” rather than “land”, Land defines the feudal upper class, capital the capitalist upper class.

But otherwise that's spot on.

Re: Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

#32

Post by yardie »

In all my travels no one is more deluded about the middle class than in the US. Healthcare is cheaper in Europe therefore it must be worse, somehow. The government is completely dysfunctional and we are worse off for it. Rather than pay slightly more to fully fund a working city/state/federal government everyone would rather pay slightly less and have a government that can't work at all. Then, complain about the fact the government doesn't work at all. Yes, the DMV sucks, but guess what, that is the level of service voters decided they wanted and that is what the DMV can deliver based on it's funding; 1-2 hour wait times with 2 or 3 agents at the counter.

Re: Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

#33

Post by victoriasun »

crushcrashcrush wrote: post #8

I have a real, honest to goodness question. I live in the Bay Area. I make $200,000 a year. I just had a mini-exit where I netted about $300K after taxes. I still rent for $2700/month. I don't want to buy an overpriced home in the bay in the suburbs (I wish we had for-sale condos like Toronto everywhere... still don't know why) I do well. I'm 32. I'm on an upwards path. But I don't feel upper class. I feel middle cla…

I would fathom a guess that you feel middle class for 2 reasons:

1. Your life doesn't fit in line with your expectations of upper class.

2. 200k a year in the Bay Area is, in its weird, sad way, middle class.

3. The feeling of "killing it" is pretty difficult to obtain when you are an ambitious person.

But you are doing well. You are probably doing better off than most people, even in the Bay Area. I hope that you can find some peace within yourself, because the only person who can make you feel successful is yourself. It seems to me that you need to learn how to set trajectories for yourself with success outcomes that resonate with you.

Re: Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

#34

Post by fuddle »

crushcrashcrush wrote: post #8

I have a real, honest to goodness question. I live in the Bay Area. I make $200,000 a year. I just had a mini-exit where I netted about $300K after taxes. I still rent for $2700/month. I don't want to buy an overpriced home in the bay in the suburbs (I wish we had for-sale condos like Toronto everywhere... still don't know why) I do well. I'm 32. I'm on an upwards path. But I don't feel upper class. I feel middle cla…

Your living in one of the most expensive areas in the world. If you moved somewhere cheaper you'd be considered the upper class. It's all relative.

Re: Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

#36

Post by ixtli »

wildmusings wrote: post #20
ixtli wrote: post #4

My intuition about this as someone who grew up in America and has traveled internationally quite a bit is that nowhere else on earth are the middle classes so convinced that one day they will be "millionaires" than here. This causes them to act against their own best interests. (This was observed by Engels long ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness )

Would you rather be richer and have more buying power in absolute terms, or just make sure the fellow next door doesn’t have more than you? This graph is misleading. It talks about middle class as a percent of national median income, which means large numbers of people counted as lower-class in the US would be counted as middle-class if they lived in Europe and made the same income.

Neither: I care that the fellow next door has access to first world quality food, shelter, education, and medicine without means testing. I also see no evidence that this desire is at odds at all with my lifestyle as a quasi-middle class person living comfortably.

Re: Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

#37

Post by RobAtticus »

mfoy_ wrote: post #28
akhilcacharya wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make a lot less than that and my rent is more than that now... I’m also 10 years younger.

How exactly does a 22-year-old have a $3k+ rent?

There are plenty of 1-bedrooms in high-cost of living areas like NYC, so one way is for the 22-year-old to rent one of them? Now it may not be financially advisable, but if he's making 120k that would be both "a lot less" than 200k and possible to rent a 3k apt, since landlords usually want 40x rent as income.

Re: Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

#38

Post by mbesto »

ixtli wrote: post #4

My intuition about this as someone who grew up in America and has traveled internationally quite a bit is that nowhere else on earth are the middle classes so convinced that one day they will be "millionaires" than here. This causes them to act against their own best interests. (This was observed by Engels long ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness )

Conversely, it's also what has attracted so many immigrants to America and created so much historic social mobility[0]. Note - I believe this has largely been reversed (and thus stagnated) due to a generation of "I got mine" attitudes, aka the Baby Boomers.

[0]Example - in the UK there is very much a "these are the cards I've been dealt" attitude towards social mobility.

Re: Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

#39

Post by somethoughts »

Interestingly it seems from this articles figures that the actual disposable income of the middle class and lower class of the US is much higher than in Europe [1].

"The United States’ smaller middle income group still earns more than almost all its Western European counterparts. The average disposable income among middle income Americans in 2010 was $60,884, placing it comfortably ahead of Norway, which averaged $56,960. The one exception to Western Europe’s income trends was Luxembourg."

[1] https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/euro-vs-american-middle...

Re: Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA

#40

Post by derefr »

crushcrashcrush wrote: post #8

I have a real, honest to goodness question. I live in the Bay Area. I make $200,000 a year. I just had a mini-exit where I netted about $300K after taxes. I still rent for $2700/month. I don't want to buy an overpriced home in the bay in the suburbs (I wish we had for-sale condos like Toronto everywhere... still don't know why) I do well. I'm 32. I'm on an upwards path. But I don't feel upper class. I feel middle cla…

“Upper class” is defined, in most modern usages I’ve seen, as someone who does not so much work to earn money as they work to earn favor, where “favor” is the ability to access various sorts of line-of-credit drawn from wealthy people’s bank accounts because of your connection to them.

In est: the upper class are courtiers. Courtiers for investments, placements onto boards of directors, management roles of other people’s wealth, and so on. All upper-class people are inherently both grantors, and recipients, of such favor.

And once you have such favor, money becomes kind of irrelevant. You can access huge pools of other people’s money, to do whatever you want to do, so why would you need your own money? (Even if, sometimes, you do. There are such things as “starving nobles”, who have the ability to command others’ fortunes but who have no personal fortune. Usually because they’ve already put their personal fortune to work in some way.)

If you’ve ever read the Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the “whuffie” currency from that book is basically already reality for the upper class. (The only difference is that whuffie puts a legible number on aggregate total favor, which is intentionally made as illegible as possible in reality.)

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