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Where the Middle Class Is Shrinking
- twoodfin 10y agoI don't think this presentation gives a useful picture of larger trends without at least some projection of relative population. It puts Barnstable County, MA (population 215,000) on the same representational footing as Washington-Arlington-Alexandria (population 6,000,000).
- beachstartup 10y agoi'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 calls it 'upper income', not 'upper class', which i generally agree more with. this is probably a slight editorial twist by nytimes to emphasize the point.
- dragontamer 10y agoI don't think the specific number matters too much. As long as the number was consistent in the survey, the point is made.
- beachstartup 10y agoi 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.
- dragontamer 10y agoThe 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.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> Does it matter if you're capturing the middle 20% or the middle 60% of the country? Not really. Its actually capturing a multiplier below and above the median. If it was capturing a fixed percentage in the middle, then the share in the "middle class" could not change over time...
- dragontamer 10y agoLol, good point. But you'd be able to see the income spread of the middle class. Its the spread that matters, and holding the income multiplier steady and then looking at %... Or holding the % steady (then looking at the income numbers)... That doesn't matter. Really. They all measure the spread away from the median over time.
- stanmancan 10y agoAgreed. 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.
- vox_mollis 10y agoI 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.
- g00gler 10y agoThat's true, but what do you do for a living? I think it'd be significantly harder to find a job as a developer in the middle of nowhere, it's even hard to find an interesting job in the suburbs IME.
- vox_mollis 10y agoI'm a 60% developer / 40% small team lead. Do it all remotely with trips to California every two months or so. Plenty of positions are available for remote workers. From what I've seen, it's not the employers, but rather the employees. For some reason, the convenience and distractions of cities are lifestyle requirements, not employment requirements. Which is fine, but I take issue with the widespread delusion that lifestyle expenses are not a choice, especially for cognitive workers like developers, designers, etc.
- g00gler 10y agoI guess that's true, I'm just a fancyite. Gotta have that sushi delivered to me, etc
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- sosuke 10y agoWe should re-evaluate the class distinctions. Where does upper class start? Upper class to me should feel like upper class. It needs to be as you suggested at 4x or 5x the median income for the area. I think upper class is the ability to afford, without undue stress, an ample house and two car payments while still going to get manicures.
- antisthenes 10y agoThat's a pretty vague definition. Houses, cars and even food expenditures can easily vary by a factor of 3-4 even within a relatively small area based on individual preferences and habits. What is an "ample" house? Define your terms.
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- Roboprog 10y agoIf you live in San Jose - no. If you live in Modesto - yes.
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- dragonwriter 10y agoWhile 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.
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- dragonwriter 10y agoHN Title (currently "The Middle Class is Shrinking") misrepresents the title and focus of the article (source title is "Where the Middle Class is Shrinking"). Posting this separately from response on the substance of the source article (because hopefully it will be corrected and this will be come irrelevant.) EDIT: Oddly, the current HN Title is closer to the focus of an earlier Pew release [0] that is a predecessor to the one the NYTimes article behind the current title is based on [1]. [0] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl... [1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking-middle-class-a-close-look-at-changes-within-metropolitan-areas/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking...
- dang 10y agoOk, we added 'where'.
- adevine 10y agoThe source report that the article is about has a lot more data and explanations: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking-middle-class-a-close-look-at-changes-within-metropolitan-areas/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking...
- nxzero 10y agoAnyone 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?
- drawkbox 10y agoI was always told the lower class or poor are there to scare the middle class into working and supporting the upper class. The middle is the padding/margin that keeps the possibly of moving up and out of your class a seeming reality, but also keeps the divide from rich/poor from being too strong. If you just have rich/poor, the opportunities seem more dire, less opportunity and less mobility is possible and lots of bad things start to happen. A society that tends to the middle is a more healthy one, one that tends solely to rich/poor needs leaves those middle people out of luck, that is what we have now. This is also a consumer economy, the lower/middle spend over $1 or 100%+ of their incremental dollar earned, the rich only spend .05 or 5% of their incremental dollar. It is good to have consumers that can spend in a consumer economy, it helps all levels of class/wealth. Rich/poor do not spend enough to keep a consumer economy afloat that actually moves money the way it is supposed to move and you end up with stagnation and long drawn out recessions. In downturns, the poor have no money and the rich don't spend or invest in downturns enough, the middle always has to spend. If you sell products it is also nicer to have middle class out there that can buy, not just upper class. The products that target each are fairly different and there are only so many rich consumers.
- bhouston 10y agoVery often once things divide into the rich and the poor, there is decreased mobility and often the divide is along ethnic lines. This increases tensions and reduces social cohesion. The rich actually stop caring about the lower classes and then either they deny rights to the lower class (e.g. dictatorship, occupation, etc.) or the lower class elects people who take away richness from the upper class (e.g. socialism, revolution, etc.) -- either way it is a mess once the divide becomes entrenched and social cohesion breaks down. One book that covers this well is World on Fire: https://www.amazon.ca/World-Fire-Exporting-Democracy-Instability/dp/0385721862 https://www.amazon.ca/World-Fire-Exporting-Democracy-Instabi...
- mc32 10y agoIn some places the middle class is losing pop to the upper class, in others it's losing pop to the lower class. It's also a moving target. It's based on relative income rather than a set point of achievements (ability to send offspring to college/uni). On the other hand we can infer that it's not as easy as it once was to become middle class through union/blue collar jobs, except in some government spheres. Beset by offshoring and major political parties who only visit factories for photo ops, the blue collar middle class is feeling the strain and are making themselves felt by both parties who may ignore them at their political peril -if they continue to carry the brunt of the negative changes necessary for progress, their dissatisfaction will transform from indifference to a large political movement both major parties will have to manage in the next few election cycles.
- GCA10 10y agoOr maybe a small political movement. Much of our family traces back to the Midwest or southern New England factory towns. It's been quite astonishing seeing the professional and geographic migrations that happen as a new generation comes of age. The starting point is just as described: Rust Belt parents with fraying big-company jobs that were predicated on medium incomes, mid-level skills and high expected levels of job security. The next generation is ending up in Seattle or North Carolina. Some are going to Colorado, California or Washington DC. They aren't staying in their parents' communities. They're switching employers more, and they're ending up in fluid fields like IT security, consulting, social services, graphic design, etc. where you're expected to fine-tune your career every few years. Yeah, the older generation is unhappy and ready to vote for politicians who engage with them. But the next generation isn't asking government to make societal change stop. They just want a fair shot at whatever new opportunities come along (and some dreamy stuff about making college both cheaper, easier and more useful - all at once.)
- mc32 10y agoI don't think it's going to get easier for new grads for a while, if ever. We're automating and offshoring jobs to remain "competitive" i.e. retain more profits. Not all kids, white or black will be getting advanced degrees in a large enough volume to counteract this trend. While many people think of this as a blue collar white people issue, it's actually a poorly educated people issue which affects blacks and whites of poor backgrounds. Men and women. We're not going to age out of the conundrum.
- dragonwriter 10y agoThe 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 a descriptor of how one relates to society and the economic system.) What it actually is addressing is particular local areas where the share of the local population in a particular definition of the national "middle" of the income distribution is declining. (Well, actually, the article indicates that, but somewhat misrepresents the source research [0], which indicates that the locality-based analysis includes adjustments for local cost of living, so the definitions stated in the NYT article aren't actually what the graphics are based on.) (Much of that so-called "middle class" income group would be working class by the conventional definitions used in looking at capitalist/mixed economies, and the middle class would extend well into what that study calls the "upper class" -- the traditional lower/working, middle, and upper/capitalist classes are not defined with the middle being around the median wealth or income, but by the middle being neither completely dependent on wage labor and immediately at risk from its loss like the lower/working class nor primarily relying on renting others labor to apply to their own capital, like the upper/capitalist class; the middle class has always been almost entirely in the upper half of the income distribution.) [0] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking-middle-class-a-close-look-at-changes-within-metropolitan-areas/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking...
- chc 10y agoIn common discourse in America, at least, "middle-class" doesn't really seem to mean either of these things. It generally seems to refer to people who are not recognizably in poverty, but are not recognizably wealthy either — think of the stereotypical '50s atomic family that you've seen on so many TV shows, which owns a home and a car and can reliably put food on the table, but is still strongly dependent on wages and can't afford a large amount of luxuries. So when people talk about the decline of the middle class, I think they mean a decline in people who are not obviously poor or rich, and instead fall "in the middle."
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- nugget 10y agoI 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.
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoThat's just warmed over Malthus. There's another class of (more depressing, IMO) dystopias like "Blade Runner", where people are nothing more than grist for the mill in large hyper-metropolises.
- williamscales 10y agoOh, you mean like we used to do in the past? History repeats itself...
- thrownaway2424 10y agoThe 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 http://www.nber.org/papers/w17234 and http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-America/dp/080507774X http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-Amer... for more on that.
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoThat book is so totally "OMG, what's WRONG with those people???" Emphasis "those people." While that's one interpretation, there's Long been conflict in the US on the rural-urban axis - see Andrew Jackson's vision versus Alexander Hamilton's vision Race is only useful in this sort of thing as a predictor of rough economic class, and even then it's less than useful. IOW, I don't think it's specifically race. A better resource is "American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America" http://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029 http://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cult...
- rayvd 10y agohttps://www.aei.org/publication/monday-afternoon-links-28/ https://www.aei.org/publication/monday-afternoon-links-28/ More about upward mobility and immigration trends. No need for all the hand wringing!
- 6stringmerc 10y agoA 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-manufacturing-they-miss-unions/ 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.
- tosseraccount 10y agoPolls show a tight race between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton in the Midwest ... so we're likely to have focus on the middle income vote. We typically don't see the income inequality that we see on the coasts.
- 6stringmerc 10y agoThanks for adding the perspective - it wasn't something I was familiar with, re: Midwest and that kind of demographic. I was familiar with good wages in a lot of dominant industries (when jobs are available, etc). The region should be interesting to watch, as you note, regarding how the bloc is courted (and whether it works or not).
- mikekij 10y agoI'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?
- ronnier 10y agoI believe what you are seeing is the white middle class dying off.
- tosseraccount 10y agohttp://www.prb.org/publications/datasheets/2012/world-population-data-sheet/fact-sheet-us-population.aspx http://www.prb.org/publications/datasheets/2012/world-popula... White fertility is relatively stable; other demographics are declining faster.
- knowaveragejoe 10y agoUp? At least, that's what some of the graphs appear to show.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> 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 <br> tag in HN comments, without going to code mode.)
- usefulcat 10y agoIf the lower class is significantly larger than the middle class in absolute terms, then the movement of a given number of people from middle to lower will have a relatively larger impact on the slope of the middle class line than on the lower class line.
- quadrangle 10y ago
- blakesterz 10y agoMany 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.
- quadrangle 10y agoYou only looked at the first section. There's three sections in the article: areas where middle moved to upper, areas where middle moved down, areas where middle split between moving up and down. The article headline was wrong in the posting here, btw.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> I guess the word "Shrinking" here is assumed to mean "Gone Down" 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-middle-class-is-losing-ground/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl...
- tonyedgecombe 10y agoIs this a result of the political shift to the right or is there more to it?
- ericssmith 10y agoElizabeth Warren makes similar observations in presentation at UC Berkeley in 2007 http://www.uctv.tv/shows/The-Coming-Collapse-of-the-Middle-Class-Higher-Risks-Lower-Rewards-and-a-Shrinking-Safety-Net-with-Elizabeth-Warren-12620 http://www.uctv.tv/shows/The-Coming-Collapse-of-the-Middle-C...
- johnohara 10y agoNot sure why you've been down voted. I found the talk you cited to be interesting and insightful, somewhat narrow in perspective, but nevertheless prescient, given the problems that occurred a year later. She has become more controversial of course since then, and more well known politically, which may account for your negative votes. I don't know. But her observations about the use of revolving credit to counteract the effects of stagnant wage growth (in real terms) is still relevant today. The narrow emphasis on wages however, ignores the wealth creation made using other means, for example, by small business and entrepreneurship.
- sixtypoundhound 10y agoUgh - while I agree with the conclusion, the statistical definitions here don't have any connection with reality. $125,000 is "upper class", you say, regardless of location? <explodes into laughter> Let's translate that into the real world, shall we? $125,000 Household Income.... Who makes it: - IT manager or Senior Dev with stay at home spouse - Mid-level Dev ($90K) married to a K-12 teacher ($40K) - Two junior software developers (co-habituating) Location matters, incidentally - if you're in CA / NY / Northeast Coast, this is barely enough to buy a house (and I hope you like driving / riding the train for a few hours). A better analysis would be to draw the line somewhere in the the $200,000 - $500,000 range (based on salary + bonus, no equity boost) and include passive income. This is the point where you get a meaningful change in social options from the income (eg. top tier housing, private schools, accredited investor status, second home, ample emergency funds, etc.). Also incorporate some view of regional costs - since the "Social Freedom" point is much higher in NY / CA than in rural Alabama. Sad to say, there are many areas of the country where living on $125,000 still definitely sucks.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> $125,000 is "upper class", you say, regardless of location? If you click through to the source report, the locality-based breakdowns are, in fact, based on income criteria adjusted from the national definition using metro-area-specific cost of living.
- sixtypoundhound 10y agoThank you - missed that. The $125,000 line still doesn't make sense though, even in flyover country (where I live). That's barely enough to buy a 2nd/3rd tier home in a strong school district where I live. Would think that easy access to good schools and good housing are table-stakes for being "upper class".
- dragonwriter 10y agoAgain, as I've posted several other places on this thread, the report is addressing a multiplier based region around the median income, a kind of "middle income tier". It has (despite the title) very little to do with "middle class", except insofar as the use of that term is drifting, at least in the US, to refer to various definitions of middle income tiers. > Would think that easy access to good schools and good housing are table-stakes for being "upper class". Honestly, I'd say that access to good public schools and good housing are typical for middle class; if you are upper class your housing is probably beyond "good" and you probably aren't concerned, except from a political or philanthropic perspective, with the quality of the public schools. But this article is (language aside) really about income tiers, not class
- mancerayder 10y agoThat the income distribution is shrinking in the middle distribution of the population of the U.S. is a critical data trend with a number of unpleasant implications. From an ideological perspective, it damages the traditional worship of hard work and the idealization of middle class life. Idealistic visions (as reflected from the movies, the shows, the social policy of the era around the middle of the 20th century pretty much up until the end of it) showed the suburban life, the housewife, the house, the two car garage. It's easy to be politically complacent, knowing you're in the country that's number one, when those things are what you can realistically strive for. Laissez-faire capitalism was always sold as being more fair than the evil 'socialist' Europe - and worse - that was further east. Because even when you were low, you could feel comfortable about bettering your lot ("my grandfather came here with nothing..."). Now the stats are pointing away from that reality. Economically it's pretty iffy, given that 80+% of the American GDP is the services sector, which has a large component of dependency on spending power. Retail alone is what, 5-6% of GDP, and then you have entertainment, real estate, and much else that depends on money being spent by people not on the very top. Real estate's an interesting one. Another piece of the Dream that made us the greatest country, as we were told. That's another trend that the current generation faces that was not faced in the 1950's: the ratio of median income to median housing costs. A lot of us here are in IT (or Law or other professions that I have noticed), and in many ways we're very lucky, even if we did work hard to get to where we are, since we're further up the curve and don't face the same exposure. In the U.S. health care costs and educational costs have also gone up well above the income increases, adding further to the discontentment. Meanwhile, the political world has gone mad. We're now back to identity politics, with demagogues on both sides of the spectrum. Any explanation about the economic underlying conditions? Nope, instead we talk about immigrants, or X racial privilege, or gender/racial identity in the boardrooms, or X foreign power. New thread suggestion: "Ask HN: Which remote island can I escape to and live comfortably and cheaply?"
- zanny 10y ago> "Ask HN: Which remote island can I escape to and live comfortably and cheaply?" This is really the fundamental problem in the modern world. The interconnectedness and shrinking of the globe in terms of distance means there is absolutely no where to escape to. Anywhere you would consider going there will be some government trying to dictate how you live your life and take a portion of your livelihood, and anywhere that you might avoid that you are usually risking that in conjunction with a humvee full of armed militants storming your home and murdering you. Even a hundred years ago there were vast swathes of Australia, the central US, and South America generally uninhabited yet arable land, and the distances of the time made it infeasible for anyone to effectively police all of it. Today, not so much. About the only hope left is setting up floating colonies in the Venusian atmosphere, but the problem is well before despondent settlers can migrate on a colony ship there will be governments establishing absolute control and monitoring of any habitable space someone could try to flee to. It is like the "right to be forgotten" on Facebook - the right to be left alone was, fleetingly, a valuable thing that relatively few could enjoy, but in the same way the middle class shrinks the number of people capable of being in that state is also in dramatic decline.
- npalli 10y agoI found the following graph from the same pew research pretty interesting. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2016/05/ST_2016.05.12_middle-class-geo-ch1-02.png http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2016/05/ST_2016.05.12_m... Essentially, the middle class shrank from 55% of the population in 2000 to 51% of the population in 2014. However, the upper class absorbed 3% (3/4th) of the shrinking middle class growing from 17% to 20% of the population, while the lower class absorbed only 1% (1/4th) of the shrinking middle class. Having said that, you will not hear that 3/4th of the middle have disappeared and become upper class, you will only hear 4% of middle class has disappeared subtly implying everyone has become lower class.
- astazangasta 10y agoTake this with a grain of salt. The definition of "middle income" is flexible. For example, in the Pew analysis "middle income" is defined as between $45,115-$135,346 in 2013-2014 dollars for the year 2000, but as between $41,641-$124,924 for the year 2014. Given this difference it's unsurprising the Pew analysis finds the upper class grew, but since the definition shifts we should be suspicious of the meaning of this statistic.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> The definition of "middle income" is flexible. The definition used is consistent: an household income of 2/3 to double to the national median income. The range shifts because the median income (even in inflation-adjusted terms dollars) shifts over time. Aside from the complaints I've made about conflation of class and income elsewhere in this thread, the Pew definition is a reasonable and consistent way of defining a middle income tier over time, in a way which makes sense to talk about changes in size of that tier as an indicator of polarization of the income distribution, and which is a bit more intuitively understandable than some other distributional measures that relate to the same broad distributional concepts (e.g., the Gini coefficient of income.)
- astazangasta 10y agoDo you think this is intended to summarize the shift in median income (generally downward since 1997)? If so, why not just discuss that? If not, the effects of that shift are surely confounding whatever it is they ARE trying to summarize (some nebulous quantity called "the middle class").
- jderick 10y agoHere is the best article I could find on the topic. If you have not read Piketty's book it is a good summary: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/growing-apart-a-political-history-of-american-inequality/index http://scalar.usc.edu/works/growing-apart-a-political-histor...