16 ms·

America's upper middle class is growing

46 points by arcanus 10y ago

thescriptkiddie 10y ago
Meanwhile, the middle middle class and lower middle class, as well as the middle class as a whole, are not. And the top 1% take home 49.9% of all income. Also, this article has an auto-playing video that is loud as hell and FOLLOWS YOU AROUND THE PAGE.
- dang 10y ago
  Ok, we found a different URL for you and changed it from http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/21/news/economy/upper-middle-class/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/21/news/economy/upper-middle-cl.... But please, no more all caps! (That's actually in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
  - bryanlarsen 10y ago
    Here's another from the same report: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-because-many-people-are-getting-richer.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/the...
  - thescriptkiddie 10y ago
    Thank you for your service.
- cpursley 10y ago
  I'm not defending the top 1%, but that corresponds fairly closely to the percentage of overall individual income taxes collected from them (45.7%)^1. People and politicians like to bemoan the top 1% for not paying their "fair share", but that's a significant amount of tax considering 45% pay no income tax.^2 ^1 http://www.bankrate.com/financing/wealth/what-does-1-percent-pay-in-taxes/ http://www.bankrate.com/financing/wealth/what-does-1-percent... ^2 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/45-of-americans-pay-no-federal-income-tax-2016-02-24 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/45-of-americans-pay-no-fede...
  - khuey 10y ago
    Substantial amounts of the government is funded through non-income taxes. Like the 1.5T or so of Social Security and Medicare spending.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Meanwhile, the middle middle class and lower middle class, as well as the middle class as a whole, are not. And the top 1% take home 49.9% of all income. No, they don't. The top 5% have a little over 20% of all income [0]. [0] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/time-series/historical-income-households/h02ar.xls https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/time-ser...
  - thescriptkiddie 10y ago
    My bad, that was supposed to say top 10%.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      It's more like the top quintile (20%) has around 50% of the income, see the same source in my last post upthread.
      - thescriptkiddie 10y ago
        The top quintile had 51.2% of aggregate income in 2014, or 2.56 times their share. But things rapidly get worse as you go up from there: the top 5% alone had 21.9% of aggregate income in 2014, or 4.38 times their share. My source for the top 10% having 49.9% of aggregate income in 2014 was Figure 9 of Saez, Emmanuel. "Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States", on page 9 of the PDF linked below. https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2014.pdf https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2014.pdf
dang 10y ago
Thomas Frank argues in his new book that the class distinction having the most political effect in the U.S. right now is not that of the 1%, but that of the professional class (roughly the same as what this study calls upper middle class), which is doing quite well while others are not. The situation in other western countries appears similar. I find this distinction thought-provoking because it corresponds to what I personally observe (or at least believe I do).
carsongross 10y ago
Real income for even the top 5% has been flat since 2000: http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/census/household-incomes-growth-real-annotated.gif http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/census/hous... Yes, the upper middle class hasn't been hit as hard as the middle and the lower classes (particularly in social ills like illegitimacy, which has gone critical among lower and middle class whites, in particular) but it's idiotic to say that the upper middle is thriving. College costs, medical costs and housing costs are all skyrocketing, the children of the upper middle class are entering an economically uncertain world where what were previously solid paths to financial security are suddenly precarious and intensely competitive. And, believe it or not, some of us upper middle class folks actually care if the rest of America is doing well, and don't feel like we are thriving when we are watching reasonable, hard working middle and lower class folks sink into poverty due to our feckless leaders.
- dang 10y ago
  It's good to bring up other sources, but not good to start off with "bullshit" and finish with "some of us [...] actually give a shit", as if others don't. That is rage rhetoric, and we don't want it in HN comments. Even if what you say is all true, the effect of the truth is drowned out by that of the rage, which is infectious. Here's a summary of what we do want, written by the founder of this community: Comment[s] should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761 I've always found that to be an excellent way of putting it, and it's on the short list for additions to the HN guidelines.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  That's not contradictory at all. The report says that the number of people making more than twice the median income has increased, not that those in the upper middle class are doing better.
  - nickbauman 10y ago
    So... is it a bad article title?
arenaninja 10y ago
I find this article misleading. > ... the upper middle class ... controlled 52.1 percent of total income in 2014, up from 29.6 percent in 1979. But had their income growth kept pace with their population expansion, they'd only control 48 percent. So their income grew from a population-adjusted 48% to 52.1%? That's relatively minor, I wouldn't even call it thriving. Also, don't the majority of actually rich people earn wealth via means other than income? EDIT: The HN title is "America's upper middle class is growing", the link has the title "America's upper middle class is thriving". I'd agree that it's growing, but thriving is a hard sell given what's highlighted in the article
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  The class is thriving because so many more people are entering the class, not because individual members of the class are doing so much better.
  - colomon 10y ago
    Chart which nicely shows this at http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-because-many-people-are-getting-richer.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/the...
    - pastProlog 10y ago
      According to that chart's definitions, a San Francisco household where there is one child and in which the husband makes $65k, and the wife makes $35k, is upper middle class. This is not upper middle class as traditionally defined.
      - antisthenes 10y ago
        Their range for upper middle class of $100k to $350k doesn't make any sense. That's a huge disparity of incomes and, based on the locale, it means an even larger gap in discretionary income. In fact looking at the numbers without looking at the discretionary income makes no sense whatsoever, as that is the main factor of economic mobility in the first place.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> It's not surprising that the report shows a nation that is moving up the economic ladder. That's because the institute held fixed the income ranges needed to be in a class, adjusting only for inflation. Over time, wages have grown faster than inflation. Except they haven't. [0] But family sizes have gone down, and since the methodology here defines "class" membership by a combination of income and family size, shrinking family size looks like upward class mobility. OTOH, sort of like the illusion of prosperity that was for a while maintained by borrowing against inflated real-property valuations, this is another illusion with a fairly hard limit. [0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  They have, and they haven't. Income in at least the US is two seperate Pareto distributions added together. One has grown, the other has not. And two people have "left" the middle and "joined" the upper distribution for every person who "left" the middle and joined the lower one.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
bradleyjg 10y ago
This appears to be the report on which the story is based: http://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-incomes-upper-middle-class/view/full_report http://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-i... This WSJ article (paywall) has a fuller write-up and links some other related research: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/06/21/not-just-the-1-the-upper-middle-class-is-larger-and-richer-than-ever/ http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/06/21/not-just-the-1-the... Marginal Revolution has a write up with an interesting graph that is credited to the WSJ but I didn't see there: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-because-many-people-are-getting-richer.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/the... In case you don't want to click through the definition of upper middle class used is $100,000 - $350,000 for a family of three in today's dollars (adjusted for inflation and family size as appropriate).
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
There's an old saying: "the best way to get rich is to help a rich person get even richer." If a small handful of people can create and sell a product that is profitable and scales well enough, they will be rewarded. However, the employees brought on after the company is profitable and/or has a high valuation (>$100m) are simply seen as costs. They have to be on-boarded and given the relatively low wage ceiling compared to the early employees, they have ample reason to quit and move after a year or two, so they become a turnover headache as well. Not to mention, the newbies are often the first to go if a layoff is necessary. So, in short, don't let yourself become expendable.
- analognoise 10y ago
  The graveyard is full of the previously indispensable. Everyone is expendable.
  - zghst 10y ago
    True, however everyone isn't equally expendable.
dudul 10y ago
"It defines this group as having household income of between $100,000 and $350,000 for a three-person family." I can never take this type of article seriously. $100,000 represent a different buying power in NYC, in Dencer or in Cleveland. Or can you use a salary range like that completely independent of location?
- bradleyjg 10y ago
  Rather than different buying power perhaps it represents different choices about what to do with the same buying power.
whack 10y ago
The statistics seem to be confirming exactly what Krugman said 5 years ago[1]. We're now living in an economy where a minority of highly skilled specialists (programmers, doctors, bankers, lawyers) are in high demand and are doing extremely well, and everyone else is finding out that their labor has become commoditized. That their skills/talents can be easily replaced by the lowest bidder, and given our technological progress, there isn't as much need for "warm bodies" as there was 50 years ago. We are, as scary as it seems, heading towards a two-tier society. One where the upper middle class and rich are doing extremely well, and an underclass that is living paycheck to paycheck. From this perspective, the rise of extreme candidates like Trump is almost understandable. The shrinking middle class, and the rising lower-middle-class, are finding themselves under assault, and are reaching out for anyone who is will to fight for them, against any scapegoat that can be blamed for this assault. Mexicans, Muslims, China, Free Trade - all perfect targets. Their complaints are real, but it's unfortunate that their anger is being directed towards fictitious threats. Let's face the truth and start addressing the underlying problem. We need to tax those who're benefiting tremendously from the current economy, and use this money to strengthen the middle class and help those who are falling behind. Raising the tax rates on the top 30%, and introducing a universal basic income, is a much needed first step. [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html?_r=...
- 794CD01 10y ago
  What exactly are you trying to achieve by calling a candidate as popular as Trump "extreme"?
  - ForHackernews 10y ago
    > as popular as Trump You mean hated by 70% of the electorate? http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/15/politics/washington-post-abc-news-poll-unfavorable-ratings/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/15/politics/washington-post-a...
    - 794CD01 10y ago
      There it is again. Unfavorable opinion is very different from hate. Why pretend they are the same thing?
coenhyde 10y ago
My theory is that the max output of the average worker has been eclipsed by an order of magnitude by people who can communicate with the 21st century machines. i.e programmers. Programmers are just modern day factory workers. They are leveraging their natural ability to produce more with machines. Unfortunately society hasn't realized that programming is a core skill, like math and english. Until everyone knows how to leverage their output with programming expect the gap between the upper middle class and everyone below to grow. If you're currently in the upper middle class and above and you are not leveraging software either directly in your role or as an manager / owner, then you're at risk of falling in class. When the industrial revolution started, factory workers were paid very well, relative to other workers (i.e agriculture). Once society realized that math / english was a core skill required to live in the new world, factory workers as a group grew and became the middle class. I expect the same thing to happen with programmers if we as a society get our shit together and educate our population correctly.
- MollyR 10y ago
  Won't programmers just program something that just puts programmers out of jobs. ex. Google Deepmind being trained to program itself https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429932-200-computer-with-human-like-learning-will-program-itself/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429932-200-computer... Personally I think the speed of technological progress is just too much for a multigenerational society to adapt with.
  - coenhyde 10y ago
    Most likely, but then someone will have to communicate with the AI's. Specialized knowledge will always be valued. You'll just have to learn how to leverage that by communicating with an AI. Maybe then the upper middle class will have their own AI assistants. Those who know how to tweak / improve their AI will do best. The speed of progress is definitely a concern but we're not even trying to keep up to speed as a society. We're still in denial. But at the end of the day there is infinite possible "work" for people to do. All we need is a bit of imagination to see all the crazy things we could do. And by "work" I mean things to do. The traditional definition of work will have to change. There will be more self determination. Possibly UBI emerge as a new institution arising to help transition society.
c3534l 10y ago
So let me get this straight, the upper middle class increased by 16.5% population. Wealthy people increased by 1.7% op the total population. Non-wealthy middle class shrunk by 6.6% of the population. Poor people also shrunk, presumably by the remaining 11.6%. So it sounds like everyone is doing well. Why is everyone angry and bitter then in these comments? This sounds like great news to me. Don't we want there to be more wealthy people and fewer poor people?
- zghst 10y ago
  Somehow wealth is synonymous with evil, cheating oppressor these days...
  - FilterSweep 10y ago
    No - that depends on how that wealth is acquired, or more relevant to the past decade, how it's maintained
    - antisthenes 10y ago
      In the case of land, wealth is also zero-sum, which imposes tremendous externalities on people who have not been land owners historically and allows the rent-extracting classes to widen the inequality gap (because the tax/benefit ratio for land is incorrect)
zwieback 10y ago
Nobody seems to be commenting on "the standard of living has gone up for nearly all Americans". A basket-of-goods analysis seems a lot more interesting than focussing on income or wealth statistics. I'm in favor of large-scale redistribution but before we do that we need better metrics of who is in need.
astazangasta 10y ago
This is all based on your definition of inflation and nothing else. In the full report (http://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-incomes-upper-middle-class/view/full_report http://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-i...) we can see that in Figure 1, all ranks of income have increased their income since 1979 except those < 5%. At the median we have ~ 30% gain in income. This result is a product of the choice of an inflation measure called the "personal consumption expenditure". Here http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/census/household-income-median-annual-real-growth-with-4-deflators.gif http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/census/hous... you can see the difference between median income as adjusted by PCE or by the more traditional CPI. With the former, we see a median income gain of almost 36%, and with the latter a gain of only 7.5%. CPI adjustments also show that since 2000, median income has actually fallen by 9% (see here http://www.advisorperspectives.com/commentaries/images/household-income-monthly-median-growth-since-2000.gif http://www.advisorperspectives.com/commentaries/images/house...). In other words, this result means nothing unless we believe that PCE is a better measure of inflation than the CPI. What's the difference? As far as I can tell (I've never studied this before), CPI measures only out-of-pocket expenditures by households, whereas PCE measures services targeted towards individuals as well. Especially (from WP): "CPI measures only the out-of-pocket healthcare costs of households where PCE includes healthcare purchased on behalf of households by third parties, including employer-provided health insurance. In the United States, employer health insurance is a large component and accounts for much of the difference in weights." In other words, what's being measured here is not that America's "upper middle class is growing", what is ACTUALLY being measured here is the rampant growth in health care costs, which means that more and more of American's income is being lost to employer-provided healthcare. This would be fine if we believed that health care outcomes were actually improving at the rate that health care costs have been increasing (well ABOVE the rate of inflation), but this is not, in fact, a reasonable assumption. This is just saying, because you pay your doctor twice as much now as you did in 1979, you are better off, and are now 'upper middle class'.
MaysonL 10y ago
How much of this change is simply the result of the rise in women joining the work force? Given that something like the female labor force participation rate is some 20% higher now than in the 70s, it seems likely to me that most of the change reflects the rise in two-earner households and the decline in family sizes.

46 points by arcanus 10y ago

Meanwhile, the middle middle class and lower middle class, as well as the middle class as a whole, are not. And the top 1% take home 49.9% of all income. Also, this article has an auto-playing video that is loud as hell and FOLLOWS YOU AROUND THE PAGE.

dang 10y ago
Ok, we found a different URL for you and changed it from http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/21/news/economy/upper-middle-class/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/21/news/economy/upper-middle-cl.... But please, no more all caps! (That's actually in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  Here's another from the same report: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-because-many-people-are-getting-richer.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/the...
- thescriptkiddie 10y ago
  Thank you for your service.
cpursley 10y ago
I'm not defending the top 1%, but that corresponds fairly closely to the percentage of overall individual income taxes collected from them (45.7%)^1. People and politicians like to bemoan the top 1% for not paying their "fair share", but that's a significant amount of tax considering 45% pay no income tax.^2 ^1 http://www.bankrate.com/financing/wealth/what-does-1-percent-pay-in-taxes/ http://www.bankrate.com/financing/wealth/what-does-1-percent... ^2 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/45-of-americans-pay-no-federal-income-tax-2016-02-24 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/45-of-americans-pay-no-fede...
- khuey 10y ago
  Substantial amounts of the government is funded through non-income taxes. Like the 1.5T or so of Social Security and Medicare spending.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Meanwhile, the middle middle class and lower middle class, as well as the middle class as a whole, are not. And the top 1% take home 49.9% of all income. No, they don't. The top 5% have a little over 20% of all income [0]. [0] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/time-series/historical-income-households/h02ar.xls https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/time-ser...
- thescriptkiddie 10y ago
  My bad, that was supposed to say top 10%.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    It's more like the top quintile (20%) has around 50% of the income, see the same source in my last post upthread.
    - thescriptkiddie 10y ago
      The top quintile had 51.2% of aggregate income in 2014, or 2.56 times their share. But things rapidly get worse as you go up from there: the top 5% alone had 21.9% of aggregate income in 2014, or 4.38 times their share. My source for the top 10% having 49.9% of aggregate income in 2014 was Figure 9 of Saez, Emmanuel. "Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States", on page 9 of the PDF linked below. https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2014.pdf https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2014.pdf

dang 10y ago

Thomas Frank argues in his new book that the class distinction having the most political effect in the U.S. right now is not that of the 1%, but that of the professional class (roughly the same as what this study calls upper middle class), which is doing quite well while others are not. The situation in other western countries appears similar. I find this distinction thought-provoking because it corresponds to what I personally observe (or at least believe I do).

carsongross 10y ago

Real income for even the top 5% has been flat since 2000: http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/census/household-incomes-growth-real-annotated.gif http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/census/hous... Yes, the upper middle class hasn't been hit as hard as the middle and the lower classes (particularly in social ills like illegitimacy, which has gone critical among lower and middle class whites, in particular) but it's idiotic to say that the upper middle is thriving. College costs, medical costs and housing costs are all skyrocketing, the children of the upper middle class are entering an economically uncertain world where what were previously solid paths to financial security are suddenly precarious and intensely competitive. And, believe it or not, some of us upper middle class folks actually care if the rest of America is doing well, and don't feel like we are thriving when we are watching reasonable, hard working middle and lower class folks sink into poverty due to our feckless leaders.

dang 10y ago
It's good to bring up other sources, but not good to start off with "bullshit" and finish with "some of us [...] actually give a shit", as if others don't. That is rage rhetoric, and we don't want it in HN comments. Even if what you say is all true, the effect of the truth is drowned out by that of the rage, which is infectious. Here's a summary of what we do want, written by the founder of this community: Comment[s] should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761 I've always found that to be an excellent way of putting it, and it's on the short list for additions to the HN guidelines.
bryanlarsen 10y ago
That's not contradictory at all. The report says that the number of people making more than twice the median income has increased, not that those in the upper middle class are doing better.
- nickbauman 10y ago
  So... is it a bad article title?

arenaninja 10y ago

I find this article misleading. > ... the upper middle class ... controlled 52.1 percent of total income in 2014, up from 29.6 percent in 1979. But had their income growth kept pace with their population expansion, they'd only control 48 percent. So their income grew from a population-adjusted 48% to 52.1%? That's relatively minor, I wouldn't even call it thriving. Also, don't the majority of actually rich people earn wealth via means other than income? EDIT: The HN title is "America's upper middle class is growing", the link has the title "America's upper middle class is thriving". I'd agree that it's growing, but thriving is a hard sell given what's highlighted in the article

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
The class is thriving because so many more people are entering the class, not because individual members of the class are doing so much better.
- colomon 10y ago
  Chart which nicely shows this at http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-because-many-people-are-getting-richer.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/the...
  - pastProlog 10y ago
    According to that chart's definitions, a San Francisco household where there is one child and in which the husband makes $65k, and the wife makes $35k, is upper middle class. This is not upper middle class as traditionally defined.
    - antisthenes 10y ago
      Their range for upper middle class of $100k to $350k doesn't make any sense. That's a huge disparity of incomes and, based on the locale, it means an even larger gap in discretionary income. In fact looking at the numbers without looking at the discretionary income makes no sense whatsoever, as that is the main factor of economic mobility in the first place.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> It's not surprising that the report shows a nation that is moving up the economic ladder. That's because the institute held fixed the income ranges needed to be in a class, adjusting only for inflation. Over time, wages have grown faster than inflation. Except they haven't. [0] But family sizes have gone down, and since the methodology here defines "class" membership by a combination of income and family size, shrinking family size looks like upward class mobility. OTOH, sort of like the illusion of prosperity that was for a while maintained by borrowing against inflated real-property valuations, this is another illusion with a fairly hard limit. [0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
They have, and they haven't. Income in at least the US is two seperate Pareto distributions added together. One has grown, the other has not. And two people have "left" the middle and "joined" the upper distribution for every person who "left" the middle and joined the lower one.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

bradleyjg 10y ago

This appears to be the report on which the story is based: http://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-incomes-upper-middle-class/view/full_report http://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-i... This WSJ article (paywall) has a fuller write-up and links some other related research: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/06/21/not-just-the-1-the-upper-middle-class-is-larger-and-richer-than-ever/ http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/06/21/not-just-the-1-the... Marginal Revolution has a write up with an interesting graph that is credited to the WSJ but I didn't see there: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-because-many-people-are-getting-richer.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/the... In case you don't want to click through the definition of upper middle class used is $100,000 - $350,000 for a family of three in today's dollars (adjusted for inflation and family size as appropriate).

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

There's an old saying: "the best way to get rich is to help a rich person get even richer." If a small handful of people can create and sell a product that is profitable and scales well enough, they will be rewarded. However, the employees brought on after the company is profitable and/or has a high valuation (>$100m) are simply seen as costs. They have to be on-boarded and given the relatively low wage ceiling compared to the early employees, they have ample reason to quit and move after a year or two, so they become a turnover headache as well. Not to mention, the newbies are often the first to go if a layoff is necessary. So, in short, don't let yourself become expendable.

analognoise 10y ago
The graveyard is full of the previously indispensable. Everyone is expendable.
- zghst 10y ago
  True, however everyone isn't equally expendable.

dudul 10y ago

"It defines this group as having household income of between $100,000 and $350,000 for a three-person family." I can never take this type of article seriously. $100,000 represent a different buying power in NYC, in Dencer or in Cleveland. Or can you use a salary range like that completely independent of location?

bradleyjg 10y ago
Rather than different buying power perhaps it represents different choices about what to do with the same buying power.

whack 10y ago

The statistics seem to be confirming exactly what Krugman said 5 years ago[1]. We're now living in an economy where a minority of highly skilled specialists (programmers, doctors, bankers, lawyers) are in high demand and are doing extremely well, and everyone else is finding out that their labor has become commoditized. That their skills/talents can be easily replaced by the lowest bidder, and given our technological progress, there isn't as much need for "warm bodies" as there was 50 years ago. We are, as scary as it seems, heading towards a two-tier society. One where the upper middle class and rich are doing extremely well, and an underclass that is living paycheck to paycheck. From this perspective, the rise of extreme candidates like Trump is almost understandable. The shrinking middle class, and the rising lower-middle-class, are finding themselves under assault, and are reaching out for anyone who is will to fight for them, against any scapegoat that can be blamed for this assault. Mexicans, Muslims, China, Free Trade - all perfect targets. Their complaints are real, but it's unfortunate that their anger is being directed towards fictitious threats. Let's face the truth and start addressing the underlying problem. We need to tax those who're benefiting tremendously from the current economy, and use this money to strengthen the middle class and help those who are falling behind. Raising the tax rates on the top 30%, and introducing a universal basic income, is a much needed first step. [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html?_r=...

794CD01 10y ago
What exactly are you trying to achieve by calling a candidate as popular as Trump "extreme"?
- ForHackernews 10y ago
  > as popular as Trump You mean hated by 70% of the electorate? http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/15/politics/washington-post-abc-news-poll-unfavorable-ratings/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/15/politics/washington-post-a...
  - 794CD01 10y ago
    There it is again. Unfavorable opinion is very different from hate. Why pretend they are the same thing?

coenhyde 10y ago

My theory is that the max output of the average worker has been eclipsed by an order of magnitude by people who can communicate with the 21st century machines. i.e programmers. Programmers are just modern day factory workers. They are leveraging their natural ability to produce more with machines. Unfortunately society hasn't realized that programming is a core skill, like math and english. Until everyone knows how to leverage their output with programming expect the gap between the upper middle class and everyone below to grow. If you're currently in the upper middle class and above and you are not leveraging software either directly in your role or as an manager / owner, then you're at risk of falling in class. When the industrial revolution started, factory workers were paid very well, relative to other workers (i.e agriculture). Once society realized that math / english was a core skill required to live in the new world, factory workers as a group grew and became the middle class. I expect the same thing to happen with programmers if we as a society get our shit together and educate our population correctly.

MollyR 10y ago
Won't programmers just program something that just puts programmers out of jobs. ex. Google Deepmind being trained to program itself https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429932-200-computer-with-human-like-learning-will-program-itself/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429932-200-computer... Personally I think the speed of technological progress is just too much for a multigenerational society to adapt with.
- coenhyde 10y ago
  Most likely, but then someone will have to communicate with the AI's. Specialized knowledge will always be valued. You'll just have to learn how to leverage that by communicating with an AI. Maybe then the upper middle class will have their own AI assistants. Those who know how to tweak / improve their AI will do best. The speed of progress is definitely a concern but we're not even trying to keep up to speed as a society. We're still in denial. But at the end of the day there is infinite possible "work" for people to do. All we need is a bit of imagination to see all the crazy things we could do. And by "work" I mean things to do. The traditional definition of work will have to change. There will be more self determination. Possibly UBI emerge as a new institution arising to help transition society.

c3534l 10y ago

So let me get this straight, the upper middle class increased by 16.5% population. Wealthy people increased by 1.7% op the total population. Non-wealthy middle class shrunk by 6.6% of the population. Poor people also shrunk, presumably by the remaining 11.6%. So it sounds like everyone is doing well. Why is everyone angry and bitter then in these comments? This sounds like great news to me. Don't we want there to be more wealthy people and fewer poor people?

zghst 10y ago
Somehow wealth is synonymous with evil, cheating oppressor these days...
- FilterSweep 10y ago
  No - that depends on how that wealth is acquired, or more relevant to the past decade, how it's maintained
  - antisthenes 10y ago
    In the case of land, wealth is also zero-sum, which imposes tremendous externalities on people who have not been land owners historically and allows the rent-extracting classes to widen the inequality gap (because the tax/benefit ratio for land is incorrect)

zwieback 10y ago

Nobody seems to be commenting on "the standard of living has gone up for nearly all Americans". A basket-of-goods analysis seems a lot more interesting than focussing on income or wealth statistics. I'm in favor of large-scale redistribution but before we do that we need better metrics of who is in need.

astazangasta 10y ago

This is all based on your definition of inflation and nothing else. In the full report (http://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-incomes-upper-middle-class/view/full_report http://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-i...) we can see that in Figure 1, all ranks of income have increased their income since 1979 except those < 5%. At the median we have ~ 30% gain in income. This result is a product of the choice of an inflation measure called the "personal consumption expenditure". Here http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/census/household-income-median-annual-real-growth-with-4-deflators.gif http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/census/hous... you can see the difference between median income as adjusted by PCE or by the more traditional CPI. With the former, we see a median income gain of almost 36%, and with the latter a gain of only 7.5%. CPI adjustments also show that since 2000, median income has actually fallen by 9% (see here http://www.advisorperspectives.com/commentaries/images/household-income-monthly-median-growth-since-2000.gif http://www.advisorperspectives.com/commentaries/images/house...). In other words, this result means nothing unless we believe that PCE is a better measure of inflation than the CPI. What's the difference? As far as I can tell (I've never studied this before), CPI measures only out-of-pocket expenditures by households, whereas PCE measures services targeted towards individuals as well. Especially (from WP): "CPI measures only the out-of-pocket healthcare costs of households where PCE includes healthcare purchased on behalf of households by third parties, including employer-provided health insurance. In the United States, employer health insurance is a large component and accounts for much of the difference in weights." In other words, what's being measured here is not that America's "upper middle class is growing", what is ACTUALLY being measured here is the rampant growth in health care costs, which means that more and more of American's income is being lost to employer-provided healthcare. This would be fine if we believed that health care outcomes were actually improving at the rate that health care costs have been increasing (well ABOVE the rate of inflation), but this is not, in fact, a reasonable assumption. This is just saying, because you pay your doctor twice as much now as you did in 1979, you are better off, and are now 'upper middle class'.

MaysonL 10y ago

How much of this change is simply the result of the rise in women joining the work force? Given that something like the female labor force participation rate is some 20% higher now than in the 70s, it seems likely to me that most of the change reflects the rise in two-earner households and the decline in family sizes.