9 ms·

The Tipping Point: Most Americans No Longer Are Middle Class

140 points by randomname2 11y ago

will_pseudonym 11y ago
This is a misleading take on the data. A much better analysis would look at the size of the population who was middle class or upper class. If there is an equal increase in upper class population for every loss of middle class population, that just means that our incomes as a population are increasing. All things equal, both the mean and median would increase in that circumstance. And that's what the data looks like to a large degree. The middle class has shrunk from 61% to 50%, but the upper class has increased by nearly the same amount, 14% to 21%. Yes, that is a decrease in the middle class-or-better bucket, but it's nowhere near dire enough to be described as a tipping point. I agree that the shrinking middle class is something that needs to be discussed, but this article does the discussion a giant disservice.
- tryitnow 11y ago
  The article is just stating the middle class is shrinking - and inequality is therefore increasing. And increasing inequality is a problem. The problem with increasing inequality is not necessarily decreasing mean incomes. Inequality is a problem because of the increasing class-based polarization of society, the power differential between different families, and a host of other factors. All of which can be present and problematic regardless of whether mean incomes are increasing. This article isn't even implying that mean incomes are decreasing. I'm not clear why this article does the discussion a great disservice.
  - petergatsby 11y ago
    I'm not sure that class-based polarization is inherently problematic. Surely some degree of inequality is an inviolable consequence of a society that values both freedom and private ownership. Imagine an America in which the poorest families had two cars and a four-bedroom house, in a safe neighborhood with good schools. Would it then be considered problematic if Gates and Buffet became trillionaires? The problem is poverty; the problem is that the south pole is too far south. It's problematic that many still don't have access to the fundamental Maslow's. The space between the poles isn't.
    - deciplex 11y ago
      > Imagine an America in which the poorest families had two cars and a four-bedroom house, in a safe neighborhood with good schools. Would it then be considered problematic if Gates and Buffet became trillionaires? Yes, it would be very problematic, but not out of any sense of fairness. Unless you can find a way to decouple wealth and power, such an outsized accumulation of wealth (and therefore, of power) would be a threat to democracy. Your hypothetical, even if achievable, is not a stable one because the ruling and capitalist classes would own our government to a degree that would make even our present situation look like a sort of egalitarian paradise. It would quickly become hopelessly corrupt, and without robust representation in government, it would only be a matter of time before the rest of us were remade into serfs.
    - fweespeech 11y ago
      > I'm not sure that class-based polarization is inherently problematic The way people behave when there is class-based polarization in the US is inherently problematic. The simple fact is the lower class has to be subsidized and that money largely has to flow from the upper class. The middle class, for the most part, is a break even proposition once you factor in the cost of Medicare & Social Security for the middle class. Its a large part of why one party is so quick to blame "entitlements" is as long as they can remain on the offensive, their benefactors are largely protected.
    - Retra 11y ago
      If you have enough inequality in your society it will stop valuing freedom and private ownership. That's the problem.
  - refurb 11y ago
    Yes, but if a chunk of the middle class moved to the upper class, is that in and of itself a bad thing? Is it really preferable that no middle class move to the upper class?
    - will_pseudonym 11y ago
      Exactly! If we the entirety of the middle class disappeared and reappeared in the upper class, how would that be damaging to the country? If every member had no change or an increase to their income, it seems insane that that could have anything but a positive effect for the economy.
      - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
        It's very important (for fairness, and for social stability) that the lower class have at least a somewhat realistic possibility of crossing the gap into middle class. If they have to jump all the way to upper class, does that mean that they're more likely to be trapped in lower class? That's a bad outcome for them. (It's fine for the middle class, of course.)
        refurb 11y ago
        Yes, but this data tells us nothing about mobility. People move from class to class all the time.
        smalldataguy 11y ago
        I'm not 100%, but pretty sure that the largest predictive factor of any US citizens wealth... is the wealth of their parents.
  - jeffdavis 11y ago
    But is it inequality from one person to another, or just unequal life stages for the same individual? You could imagine a college student from a middle-class background earning very little from 20-30, then being middle-income from 30-40, then upper-income from 40-65, then retired until 85. Their independent life (20+) is 65 years, of which 30 are low-income, 10 middle-income, and 25 high income.
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      Valid point, but I believe that you mean that 10 are low-income.
      - jeffdavis 11y ago
        Retirees typically count as low income, so I included the retired years as low income. Another consideration is household size. Before, retirees may have been more likely to live with their children, but now they live more independently.
    - lotharbot 11y ago
      cperciva wrote a piece on this a while back: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-10-inequality-in-equalland.html http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-10-inequality-in-equ...
    - istjohn 11y ago
      Unequal life stages certainly contribute to inequality, but the Atlantic published an article this summer discussing research on intergenerational socioeconomic mobility: "Children born to 90th-percentile earners are typically on track to make three times more than the children of 10th-percentile earners." So socioeconomic class is definitely a big part of the equation.
    - refurb 11y ago
      Great point! Generally incomes and wealth increase with age. If your population is more heavily weighted in one particulat age bracket (baby boomers?), you'll see a shift in wealth distribution, even if everyone's average wealth at a give age remains the exact same.
- irishcoffee 11y ago
  > If there is an equal increase in upper class population for every loss of middle class population, that just means that our incomes as a population are increasing. > Yes, that is a decrease in the middle class-or-better bucket Huh? Wat? Ignoring your contradiction completely, 1.5-2 million people dropped. 2% of ~100million working people is ~2 million people. 2 million people dropped out of the middle class to the lower class. 2,000,000. Two-million individuals. Two commas. Not to mention their kids. Or their retired parent(s).
  - 13thLetter 11y ago
    Yes, and...? If you're interested in charting broad trends in a very large population, two million people may not be that relevant to your work. That's not any kind of moral judgement of those people or an argument to ignore their problems, it's just a statement of fact.
  - refurb 11y ago
    Why are you assuming they came from the middle class and not the upper class? Populations in each class are not static. Over that time period, folks moved from the lower class to the middle and upper.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > If there is an equal increase in upper class population for every loss of middle class population, that just means that our incomes as a population are increasing If they were defining boundaries by inflation-adjusted income, that would be correct. They are defining them by ratio to the median income, so more upper "class" at the expense of the middle "class" by the standards used just means increased income inequality, not increased real wealth. (It could accompany increased or decreased real wealth, but its a completely separate thing.)
  - refurb 11y ago
    But if the upper class got bigger (in terms of numbers), they must have come from the middle class based on this data. That's a good thing, no?
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      For them individually, sure, being farther above the median is better. Beyond that, I don't see how it's better in some general sense.
      - refurb 11y ago
        Why not? They are paying more taxes than they were before, benefiting society as a whole. Let me ask it another way. If some moves from the lower class to the middle class, does that benefit society as a whole (ignoring the taxes). I would say yes.
- tormeh 11y ago
  That's discussed pretty well in the article. The headline is a bit extreme, but the article is not. The problem is more one of polarization than average wealth.
adenadel 11y ago
Interesting that (since 1971) of the 10% that have "left" the middle class, 7% have moved upward while 3% have moved downward.
- meric 11y ago
  A bifurcation of society on the order of 4% over 45 years seem slow enough to not worry about...
  - kansface 11y ago
    Sure, if that were the only change.
  - kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
    ... Says the frog in the pot.
thecosas 11y ago
Here's a link to the Georgetown paper they reference as well: https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/Good-Jobs_Full_Final.pdf https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/Good-Jobs_Full...
- jpmattia 11y ago
  The title of the paper is: GOOD JOBS ARE BACK: 2015 College Graduates Are First in Line and the first listed funding source is the Lumina Foundation, whose first line on the about page says: > Lumina Foundation is an independent, private foundation committed to increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates and other credentials to 60 percent by 2025.
  - putlake 11y ago
    Excellent digging -- thanks!
gragas 11y ago
What I find interesting is the upper-income group is growing faster than the lower-income group.
dragonwriter 11y ago
Measuring "class" by income distribution measures like this kind of misses the point; more accurately this is "Most Americans no longer fit a particular definition of 'middle income'". Class distinctions are about significant qualitative distinctions, not points on a simple quantitative distribution. A reasonable upper/middle/lower class distinction could be made where the upper class has capital assets that they can and do live off the proceeds of while increasing the value and annual proceeds of the assets, the middle class has capital assets that they could (whether or not they do -- they may still work at wage labor) live for at least some months on by depleting, and the lower classes are entirely dependent on wage labor (and one could make further distinctions within these groups). This would roughly correspond with the traditional ideas of "class". EDIT: Which is all not to discount the potential significance of an ongoing increase in income inequality -- which almost certainly has some real impact in terms of the kind of things that would reasonably define class.
- ryan-c 11y ago
  Even adjusting for cost of living would be a good start to making this more useful.
- rhino369 11y ago
  And one very good reason not to conflate income and class is cost of living. A family making 130k in any major metro area is far from upper class. It's upper class in small towns. I'd venture most people making 130k+ are not in any way upper class. And a family making 40k isn't lower class in a lot of the country.
  - jackfoxy 11y ago
    Yes. It's as if the authors were looking for a particular result. The lower bound for upper income family in a metro area cannot be so low.
- chrisseaton 11y ago
  I think class is only a little bit about money and assets. You can be very poor, but have middle class education, culture and tastes, and you can be very rich, but have working class culture and tastes. If you mean wealth, then say wealth. If you're talking about 'class' instead, then you must mean something more than that, otherwise you wouldn't have used the word.
mtgx 11y ago
Yet most Americans have no problem supporting either an asshole billionaire or someone who thinks it's "their turn to be president" and is supported by Wall Street billionaires (the same people responsible for the 2008 economic crash). Most people don't seem to know what's good for them.
- ralfruns 11y ago
  People in the lower income bracket don't go to the polls in the same rate as the higher income bracket. Upps forgot the source: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/income-gap-at-the-polls-113997 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/income-gap-at...
  - daveguy 11y ago
    There should be a national "voting day" holiday. Not having one is the equivalent of a poll tax for hourly wage workers.
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      In my area, polls are open from 9 AM (or maybe earlier - I'm not a morning person) to 9 PM. No matter what your shift, you should be able to find a time to get there without having to take off work.
      - rosege 11y ago
        or have it on a saturday like lots of countries do
        AnimalMuppet 11y ago
        People work on Saturday, too. Less, it's true, but still enough that you can't disenfranchise them.
    - gweinberg 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
petergatsby 11y ago
Half-full headline: "American middle class shrinks, lower-income marginally increases, upper-income up 50%".
- y_u_no_rust 11y ago
  this is the fucking united states of america you win or you lose there never should have been a middle in the first place. get fucked over or do the fucking over
tmuir 11y ago
Where do the 42k and 126k numbers come from? Why do they define the middle class. Maybe it varies from page view to page view, but my very first recommended link at the bottom of the story had a breakdown of middle class bounds in 30 different cities, and as one would expect, middle class incomes vary widely across those cities. This article is a perfect example of the meaninglessness of averages in many cases.
- refurb 11y ago
  They just took 1/2 of the median and 2x the median as cutoffs. You can argue that's it's arbitrary, but it seems like as good an estimate as any.
  - tempestn 11y ago
    2/3 and 2x actually
    - capitalsigma 11y ago
      (2/3) and 2 * (2/3) = 4/3 i.e. what would be one standard deviation if income was perfeclty evenly distributed
- dikdik 11y ago
  For a single person it is 24k to be considered middle class. What?
neves 11y ago
I see people commenting in the technicalities of a middle class definition. They should be worried with the tendency. As a foreigner, my great admiration of the American society is that of the Self Made Man. That working hard you can have a decent life and even become rich. That everybody should have the same opportunities. Even if this is all a myth, just the belief and the desire to make it happen, is great.
- throwaway999888 11y ago
  > As a foreigner, my great admiration of the American society is that of the Self Made Man. That working hard you can have a decent life and even become rich. That everybody should have the same opportunities. Even if this is all a myth, just the belief and the desire to make it happen, is great. So go watch a movie or read a book about it. The actual reality which doesn't care about your fanciful beliefs will be waiting for when you're ready to return.
gweinberg 11y ago
Fewer poor and middle class, more rich. This is good news.
venning 11y ago
538 breaks this out with more nuance and context here: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-americans-arent-middle-class-anymore/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-americans-arent-mid...
jeffdavis 11y ago
This could also represent a compression of income-earning years. For instance, if more people spend their twenties earning little, but then their income jumps up a lot by the time they are 40, they may look middle-income for only a few years. I'm not saying this is what's happening, but based on the numbers and definitions, it's possible. In general, this kind of snapshot definition trying to capture the middle class is misleading. You should follow individuals over their life to see whether they are thriving or struggling. This is not even a class mobility issue. It's more of a life cycle issue.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
la6470 11y ago
126k for Silicon Valley upper class rofl rofl rofl
gizi 11y ago
If everybody has a college degrees, then all jobs would indeed go to people with a college degree. But even then, it would still not say anything about the likelihood to get a job, even if you hold a college degree. "If you get a college degree, you will get a job" is and has always been a fallacy.
davidjnelson 11y ago
Wouldn't it make more sense to use the ratio of income to housing costs in the analysis instead of raw income numbers? Houses can easily be 10-20x as expensive depending on where in the us you live.
fish55 11y ago
Lots of hocus-pocus in these comments looking for a qualitative measure of class. The only meaningful definition is quantitative. Do we still need to explain why? This fact is the fundamental subtext of all journalism and art since mid 19C.
rdlecler1 11y ago
These studies need to take into account cost of living in different cities, which has more variance than it used to. $120k in SF or NY is barely going to get you in the middle class. If high earnering gains have been made in these cities, then the actual distribution would be much worse.
tmaly 11y ago
Middle class is an elusive term. How much would someone living and working in New York City have to make to be considered middle class verse someone living in say Detroit? Exemptions at the federal level seem to overlook this fact.
xlm1717 11y ago
Slightly misleading title, would have been more accurate to say "Majority of Americans No Longer Are Middle Class". The current breakdown is basically 49.9% Middle Class, 50.1% not. That's a long way from "most".
edem 11y ago
I wouldn't call it a tipping point. If you look at the diagram hard enough you will see that for example since 2011 the lower class has shrunk and the upper class have become larger. This means that part of the middle class turned into upper class!

140 points by randomname2 11y ago

This is a misleading take on the data. A much better analysis would look at the size of the population who was middle class or upper class. If there is an equal increase in upper class population for every loss of middle class population, that just means that our incomes as a population are increasing. All things equal, both the mean and median would increase in that circumstance. And that's what the data looks like to a large degree. The middle class has shrunk from 61% to 50%, but the upper class has increased by nearly the same amount, 14% to 21%. Yes, that is a decrease in the middle class-or-better bucket, but it's nowhere near dire enough to be described as a tipping point. I agree that the shrinking middle class is something that needs to be discussed, but this article does the discussion a giant disservice.

tryitnow 11y ago
The article is just stating the middle class is shrinking - and inequality is therefore increasing. And increasing inequality is a problem. The problem with increasing inequality is not necessarily decreasing mean incomes. Inequality is a problem because of the increasing class-based polarization of society, the power differential between different families, and a host of other factors. All of which can be present and problematic regardless of whether mean incomes are increasing. This article isn't even implying that mean incomes are decreasing. I'm not clear why this article does the discussion a great disservice.
- petergatsby 11y ago
  I'm not sure that class-based polarization is inherently problematic. Surely some degree of inequality is an inviolable consequence of a society that values both freedom and private ownership. Imagine an America in which the poorest families had two cars and a four-bedroom house, in a safe neighborhood with good schools. Would it then be considered problematic if Gates and Buffet became trillionaires? The problem is poverty; the problem is that the south pole is too far south. It's problematic that many still don't have access to the fundamental Maslow's. The space between the poles isn't.
  - deciplex 11y ago
    > Imagine an America in which the poorest families had two cars and a four-bedroom house, in a safe neighborhood with good schools. Would it then be considered problematic if Gates and Buffet became trillionaires? Yes, it would be very problematic, but not out of any sense of fairness. Unless you can find a way to decouple wealth and power, such an outsized accumulation of wealth (and therefore, of power) would be a threat to democracy. Your hypothetical, even if achievable, is not a stable one because the ruling and capitalist classes would own our government to a degree that would make even our present situation look like a sort of egalitarian paradise. It would quickly become hopelessly corrupt, and without robust representation in government, it would only be a matter of time before the rest of us were remade into serfs.
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    > I'm not sure that class-based polarization is inherently problematic The way people behave when there is class-based polarization in the US is inherently problematic. The simple fact is the lower class has to be subsidized and that money largely has to flow from the upper class. The middle class, for the most part, is a break even proposition once you factor in the cost of Medicare & Social Security for the middle class. Its a large part of why one party is so quick to blame "entitlements" is as long as they can remain on the offensive, their benefactors are largely protected.
  - Retra 11y ago
    If you have enough inequality in your society it will stop valuing freedom and private ownership. That's the problem.
- refurb 11y ago
  Yes, but if a chunk of the middle class moved to the upper class, is that in and of itself a bad thing? Is it really preferable that no middle class move to the upper class?
  - will_pseudonym 11y ago
    Exactly! If we the entirety of the middle class disappeared and reappeared in the upper class, how would that be damaging to the country? If every member had no change or an increase to their income, it seems insane that that could have anything but a positive effect for the economy.
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      It's very important (for fairness, and for social stability) that the lower class have at least a somewhat realistic possibility of crossing the gap into middle class. If they have to jump all the way to upper class, does that mean that they're more likely to be trapped in lower class? That's a bad outcome for them. (It's fine for the middle class, of course.)
      - refurb 11y ago
        Yes, but this data tells us nothing about mobility. People move from class to class all the time.
        smalldataguy 11y ago
        I'm not 100%, but pretty sure that the largest predictive factor of any US citizens wealth... is the wealth of their parents.
- jeffdavis 11y ago
  But is it inequality from one person to another, or just unequal life stages for the same individual? You could imagine a college student from a middle-class background earning very little from 20-30, then being middle-income from 30-40, then upper-income from 40-65, then retired until 85. Their independent life (20+) is 65 years, of which 30 are low-income, 10 middle-income, and 25 high income.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    Valid point, but I believe that you mean that 10 are low-income.
    - jeffdavis 11y ago
      Retirees typically count as low income, so I included the retired years as low income. Another consideration is household size. Before, retirees may have been more likely to live with their children, but now they live more independently.
  - lotharbot 11y ago
    cperciva wrote a piece on this a while back: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-10-inequality-in-equalland.html http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-10-inequality-in-equ...
  - istjohn 11y ago
    Unequal life stages certainly contribute to inequality, but the Atlantic published an article this summer discussing research on intergenerational socioeconomic mobility: "Children born to 90th-percentile earners are typically on track to make three times more than the children of 10th-percentile earners." So socioeconomic class is definitely a big part of the equation.
  - refurb 11y ago
    Great point! Generally incomes and wealth increase with age. If your population is more heavily weighted in one particulat age bracket (baby boomers?), you'll see a shift in wealth distribution, even if everyone's average wealth at a give age remains the exact same.
irishcoffee 11y ago
> If there is an equal increase in upper class population for every loss of middle class population, that just means that our incomes as a population are increasing. > Yes, that is a decrease in the middle class-or-better bucket Huh? Wat? Ignoring your contradiction completely, 1.5-2 million people dropped. 2% of ~100million working people is ~2 million people. 2 million people dropped out of the middle class to the lower class. 2,000,000. Two-million individuals. Two commas. Not to mention their kids. Or their retired parent(s).
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  Yes, and...? If you're interested in charting broad trends in a very large population, two million people may not be that relevant to your work. That's not any kind of moral judgement of those people or an argument to ignore their problems, it's just a statement of fact.
- refurb 11y ago
  Why are you assuming they came from the middle class and not the upper class? Populations in each class are not static. Over that time period, folks moved from the lower class to the middle and upper.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> If there is an equal increase in upper class population for every loss of middle class population, that just means that our incomes as a population are increasing If they were defining boundaries by inflation-adjusted income, that would be correct. They are defining them by ratio to the median income, so more upper "class" at the expense of the middle "class" by the standards used just means increased income inequality, not increased real wealth. (It could accompany increased or decreased real wealth, but its a completely separate thing.)
- refurb 11y ago
  But if the upper class got bigger (in terms of numbers), they must have come from the middle class based on this data. That's a good thing, no?
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    For them individually, sure, being farther above the median is better. Beyond that, I don't see how it's better in some general sense.
    - refurb 11y ago
      Why not? They are paying more taxes than they were before, benefiting society as a whole. Let me ask it another way. If some moves from the lower class to the middle class, does that benefit society as a whole (ignoring the taxes). I would say yes.
tormeh 11y ago
That's discussed pretty well in the article. The headline is a bit extreme, but the article is not. The problem is more one of polarization than average wealth.

adenadel 11y ago

Interesting that (since 1971) of the 10% that have "left" the middle class, 7% have moved upward while 3% have moved downward.

meric 11y ago
A bifurcation of society on the order of 4% over 45 years seem slow enough to not worry about...
- kansface 11y ago
  Sure, if that were the only change.
- kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
  ... Says the frog in the pot.

thecosas 11y ago

Here's a link to the Georgetown paper they reference as well: https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/Good-Jobs_Full_Final.pdf https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/Good-Jobs_Full...

jpmattia 11y ago
The title of the paper is: GOOD JOBS ARE BACK: 2015 College Graduates Are First in Line and the first listed funding source is the Lumina Foundation, whose first line on the about page says: > Lumina Foundation is an independent, private foundation committed to increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates and other credentials to 60 percent by 2025.
- putlake 11y ago
  Excellent digging -- thanks!

gragas 11y ago

What I find interesting is the upper-income group is growing faster than the lower-income group.

dragonwriter 11y ago

Measuring "class" by income distribution measures like this kind of misses the point; more accurately this is "Most Americans no longer fit a particular definition of 'middle income'". Class distinctions are about significant qualitative distinctions, not points on a simple quantitative distribution. A reasonable upper/middle/lower class distinction could be made where the upper class has capital assets that they can and do live off the proceeds of while increasing the value and annual proceeds of the assets, the middle class has capital assets that they could (whether or not they do -- they may still work at wage labor) live for at least some months on by depleting, and the lower classes are entirely dependent on wage labor (and one could make further distinctions within these groups). This would roughly correspond with the traditional ideas of "class". EDIT: Which is all not to discount the potential significance of an ongoing increase in income inequality -- which almost certainly has some real impact in terms of the kind of things that would reasonably define class.

ryan-c 11y ago
Even adjusting for cost of living would be a good start to making this more useful.
rhino369 11y ago
And one very good reason not to conflate income and class is cost of living. A family making 130k in any major metro area is far from upper class. It's upper class in small towns. I'd venture most people making 130k+ are not in any way upper class. And a family making 40k isn't lower class in a lot of the country.
- jackfoxy 11y ago
  Yes. It's as if the authors were looking for a particular result. The lower bound for upper income family in a metro area cannot be so low.
chrisseaton 11y ago
I think class is only a little bit about money and assets. You can be very poor, but have middle class education, culture and tastes, and you can be very rich, but have working class culture and tastes. If you mean wealth, then say wealth. If you're talking about 'class' instead, then you must mean something more than that, otherwise you wouldn't have used the word.

mtgx 11y ago

Yet most Americans have no problem supporting either an asshole billionaire or someone who thinks it's "their turn to be president" and is supported by Wall Street billionaires (the same people responsible for the 2008 economic crash). Most people don't seem to know what's good for them.

ralfruns 11y ago
People in the lower income bracket don't go to the polls in the same rate as the higher income bracket. Upps forgot the source: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/income-gap-at-the-polls-113997 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/income-gap-at...
- daveguy 11y ago
  There should be a national "voting day" holiday. Not having one is the equivalent of a poll tax for hourly wage workers.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    In my area, polls are open from 9 AM (or maybe earlier - I'm not a morning person) to 9 PM. No matter what your shift, you should be able to find a time to get there without having to take off work.
    - rosege 11y ago
      or have it on a saturday like lots of countries do
      - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
        People work on Saturday, too. Less, it's true, but still enough that you can't disenfranchise them.
  - gweinberg 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

petergatsby 11y ago

Half-full headline: "American middle class shrinks, lower-income marginally increases, upper-income up 50%".

y_u_no_rust 11y ago
this is the fucking united states of america you win or you lose there never should have been a middle in the first place. get fucked over or do the fucking over

tmuir 11y ago

Where do the 42k and 126k numbers come from? Why do they define the middle class. Maybe it varies from page view to page view, but my very first recommended link at the bottom of the story had a breakdown of middle class bounds in 30 different cities, and as one would expect, middle class incomes vary widely across those cities. This article is a perfect example of the meaninglessness of averages in many cases.

refurb 11y ago
They just took 1/2 of the median and 2x the median as cutoffs. You can argue that's it's arbitrary, but it seems like as good an estimate as any.
- tempestn 11y ago
  2/3 and 2x actually
  - capitalsigma 11y ago
    (2/3) and 2 * (2/3) = 4/3 i.e. what would be one standard deviation if income was perfeclty evenly distributed
dikdik 11y ago
For a single person it is 24k to be considered middle class. What?

neves 11y ago

I see people commenting in the technicalities of a middle class definition. They should be worried with the tendency. As a foreigner, my great admiration of the American society is that of the Self Made Man. That working hard you can have a decent life and even become rich. That everybody should have the same opportunities. Even if this is all a myth, just the belief and the desire to make it happen, is great.

throwaway999888 11y ago
> As a foreigner, my great admiration of the American society is that of the Self Made Man. That working hard you can have a decent life and even become rich. That everybody should have the same opportunities. Even if this is all a myth, just the belief and the desire to make it happen, is great. So go watch a movie or read a book about it. The actual reality which doesn't care about your fanciful beliefs will be waiting for when you're ready to return.

gweinberg 11y ago

Fewer poor and middle class, more rich. This is good news.

venning 11y ago

538 breaks this out with more nuance and context here: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-americans-arent-middle-class-anymore/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-americans-arent-mid...

jeffdavis 11y ago

This could also represent a compression of income-earning years. For instance, if more people spend their twenties earning little, but then their income jumps up a lot by the time they are 40, they may look middle-income for only a few years. I'm not saying this is what's happening, but based on the numbers and definitions, it's possible. In general, this kind of snapshot definition trying to capture the middle class is misleading. You should follow individuals over their life to see whether they are thriving or struggling. This is not even a class mobility issue. It's more of a life cycle issue.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

la6470 11y ago

126k for Silicon Valley upper class rofl rofl rofl

gizi 11y ago

If everybody has a college degrees, then all jobs would indeed go to people with a college degree. But even then, it would still not say anything about the likelihood to get a job, even if you hold a college degree. "If you get a college degree, you will get a job" is and has always been a fallacy.

davidjnelson 11y ago

Wouldn't it make more sense to use the ratio of income to housing costs in the analysis instead of raw income numbers? Houses can easily be 10-20x as expensive depending on where in the us you live.

fish55 11y ago

Lots of hocus-pocus in these comments looking for a qualitative measure of class. The only meaningful definition is quantitative. Do we still need to explain why? This fact is the fundamental subtext of all journalism and art since mid 19C.

rdlecler1 11y ago

These studies need to take into account cost of living in different cities, which has more variance than it used to. $120k in SF or NY is barely going to get you in the middle class. If high earnering gains have been made in these cities, then the actual distribution would be much worse.

tmaly 11y ago

Middle class is an elusive term. How much would someone living and working in New York City have to make to be considered middle class verse someone living in say Detroit? Exemptions at the federal level seem to overlook this fact.

xlm1717 11y ago

Slightly misleading title, would have been more accurate to say "Majority of Americans No Longer Are Middle Class". The current breakdown is basically 49.9% Middle Class, 50.1% not. That's a long way from "most".

edem 11y ago

I wouldn't call it a tipping point. If you look at the diagram hard enough you will see that for example since 2011 the lower class has shrunk and the upper class have become larger. This means that part of the middle class turned into upper class!