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I'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?
A noteworthy companion piece would be this FiveThirtyEight look into the relationship between Unions, Wages, and the Middle Class: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-dont-miss-manu... One of the more interesting points I took away is that the Midwest, though facing issues, is one of the last holdouts of a large demographic that might be called Middle Class, often in close correlation with Union presence.
We typically don't see the income inequality that we see on the coasts.
I'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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. We live in Canada. Our household income for a family of 3 is just over $125K and I certainly don't feel like we're "upper class". We can't even afford to buy a house where we live.
I live in a town in the US where the median household income is roughly $36k and the median household size is 3.9. Most adults own their home here. I know most HN people tend to see urban/suburban areas as the only habitable zones, but come on - you are definitely living high on the hog, it's just hard to see because you choose a location and lifestyle with very high expenses.
I'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.
White fertility is relatively stable; other demographics are declining faster.
I'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?
Up? At least, that's what some of the graphs appear to show.
A very slight bias that way, national report shows; since 1971:
Lowest tier: +4 percentage points (pp)
Lower Middle: n/c
Middle: -10 pp
Upper Middle: n/c
Highest tier: +5 pp
(Difference is rounding errors.)
(Incidentally, I really wish there were a way to do the equivalent of an HTML
tag in HN comments, without going to code mode.)
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.
The article headline was wrong in the posting here, btw.
I'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?
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.
It means that the share of the population in the "middle class" (as defined in the work) has gone down, not that the direction that they have moved to the lower classes (from the national report [0] that preceded the locality-based one that the article is based on, the net movement has been nearly equal to the lowest and highest tier, with a slight bias to the highest tier.)
[0] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl...