9 ms·

The definitions of middle and rich in the report are pretty close to made up. In the latter case, the study literally uses "people who identify as rich". The s

The definitions of middle and rich in the report are pretty close to made up. In the latter case, the study literally uses "people who identify as rich". The study appears to define "middle" as 90% of respondents, which is laughable. Everyone thinks of themselves as middle, no matter how far from the actual middle they are. The obvious definition would be percentiles of income, or wealth, or other measurable advantage. This would put a lot of readers in an upper class, as which people really don’t like to think of themselves.

henrikschroder 10y ago
No, if you belong to the working class or the upper class, you most definitely don't think of yourself as middle class. Wealth and income aren't very good markers for class, there are plenty of working class members who make more money than many middle class members.
- ceras 10y ago
  Are you from outside the US? I've never heard this attitude in the US, but have heard it multiple times from people from other countries (often the UK). Here in the US I've heard families earning from $30k to $200k, working jobs from manual labor to white collar, call themselves "middle class."
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > Here in the US I've heard families earning from $30k to $200k, working jobs from manual labor to white collar, call themselves "middle class." $200K is definitely considered middle class in the US, especially by the left. For example, both Clinton and Sanders use $250K as their upper limit[0]. As for manual labor vs. white collar - it depends on what context you're talking about, but in terms of sheer economic purchasing power, that doesn't really matter that much. (Incidentally, a lot of white-collar office jobs pay a lot less than many blue-collar positions). There's definitely a class and status aspect to the term 'middle class', but that's much harder to quantify (and is also only loosely correlated with income - hence the existence of the term nouveau riche. As an aside, $200K isn't necessarily as much as people think it is, which is (one of the reasons) why people like Clinton and Sanders consider $250K to be middle class[1]. A lot of people who "make" $200K in gross income are often working jobs which require them to cover a lot of large expenses (such as vehicles/equipment) out-of-pocket, or are running their own businesses[2]. While they might seem rich if you just look at the $200K figure, that doesn't mean they're really rich in any meaningful sense of the word - even if they're frugal, they could still be living quite hand-to-mouth on that amount. [0] http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/18/news/economy/clinton-sanders-middle-class/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/18/news/economy/clinton-sanders... [1] There are more cynical, political reasons for doing it as well, but there is a factual justification for it as well. [2] I'm not talking about startups, but genuine 'small businesses', for which they're often the sole proprietor or one of very few partners.
    - refurb 10y ago
      $200K is definitely considered middle class in the US, especially by the Democrats. I think that has more to do with politics than economics. $250K is an income limit that is politically expedient. To call yourself middle class when you're making 5x the media household income is kinda silly. And yes, I know many live in HCOL areas. A lot of people who "make" $200K in gross income are often working jobs which require them to cover a lot of large expenses (such as vehicles/equipment) out-of-pocket, or are running their own businesses[2]. This doesn't make any sense to me. Your gross income is your gross income. Nobody reports what their business revenue is as gross income. You need to take out expenses first.
      - gozur88 10y ago
        >To call yourself middle class when you're making 5x the media household income is kinda silly. And yes, I know many live in HCOL areas. Cost of living matters a whole lot, though. You'd have a higher standard of living in Cleveland at $100k than in San Francisco at $250k.
        jacobolus 10y ago
        > You'd have a higher standard of living in Cleveland at $100k than in San Francisco at $250k. That’s a hyperbolic exaggeration. If you pay for a 2 bedroom apartment, transportation, food (even if the SF person only shops at Whole Foods or wherever), utilities, comparable health insurance, etc., then the SF person on a $250k salary is going to have considerably more left over to spend on whatever else they want.
        ktRolster 10y ago
        If you pay for a 2 bedroom apartment, transportation, food The price of a two bedroom apartment in SF will get you a 3,000 sq ft house with a quarter acre of land elsewhere.
        douche 10y ago
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    Here is a good essay which discusses why social class is a distinct concept to economic class: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/30/staying-classy/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/30/staying-classy/ I think it's a very useful distinction. I've seen similar things in demographic statistics. Where e.g. parents education was more predictive of their child's outcome than their income. Career choice and success is somewhat noisy and random.
    - henrikschroder 10y ago
      The underlying article by Siderea is absolutely fantastic as well. Must-read before any discussions of class!
  - chrisseaton 10y ago
    In the UK you can be a millionaire and be working class, or be destitute and middle class. It's about more than money.
  - henrikschroder 10y ago
    Yes, I'm not from the US, and yes, I'm always astounded by americans who think that your income bracket defines your class. > Here in the US I've heard families earning from $30k to $200k, working jobs from manual labor to white collar, call themselves "middle class." Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Where I'm from, the most important marker for middle class is that you value education very highly, and that you don't value physical labour above any kind of work. Obviously, the people in your example at the low end of the pay scale would most likely be lower middle class, and those at the upper would be upper middle class. The major distinctions between those would be how to perform social interactions and the size of their social networks, but they all agree that life's goal is to send your kids through college. (As opposed to being working class which means you do not value education highly, and you value physical labour ("real work!") higher than any other kind of work.)
    - WalterSear 10y ago
      The american definition of middle class is "there shows on TV that are about people like me."
      - nwjtkjn 10y ago
        Huh? There is an abundance of shows in America about rich people.
      - henrikschroder 10y ago
        That's obviously false since american TV shows portray people of pretty much every social class.
        WalterSear 10y ago
        Right. And if they aren't in prison, they are all middle class.
        ForHackernews 10y ago
        They do? What American TV shows focus on the poor or the working class? Other than Roseanne (which went off the air in 1997) I struggle to think of one.
  - ScottBurson 10y ago
    Economic class is not just a function of income. The definition of middle-class is someone whose economic survival and security are reasonably assured. If you're middle-class, you usually aren't worrying where your next dollar is coming from. You have at least a little discretionary spending money. You have some free time. In a rural area, where the cost of living is very low (and maybe you raise some of your own food), that might be possible on $30k. In the city it's likely to take at least twice that. Conversely, as long as you have to work to maintain your lifestyle, you're middle-class, not upper-class. Even if you're making $600k, if quitting your job is not a realistic option because of the mortgage on your mansion, the payments on your Ferrari, and a couple of failed investments -- you're middle-class. You're way at the upper end of the middle class, but you're still middle-class. Now, certainly, if you're making $600k and you're reasonably careful with your money, you have a golden opportunity to make investments that can, in a relatively short time, put you into the upper class. But you're not there until you have enough passive income to live on indefinitely.
    - gizmo 10y ago
      That's a very American perspective. In the UK a Duke or Earl can be close to broke, but nobles and gentry will always be considered upper class. In contrast lottery winners, successful plumbers or grocers and other businessmen will almost never become upper class, even if they are independently wealthy.
      - charlesdm 10y ago
        Right. In Europe, it also often has to do with status. For example, you can make €25m and still not be accepted by the "upper class" (i.e. wealthy "old" nobility), because you are seen as not sophisticated enough. On the other hand, decent wealth builders (but not crazy rich) people can still be accepted in the upper class because they share certain values and habits. A lot of old noblemen look down on the capitalists / nouveau riche. At the same time, the realise they need capitalists to help them generate decent yields on their inherited fortunes. It's an interesting world at the top. Some are accepted into the group, and others are not. Source: my mom is friends with several people who carry a title.
- jwatte 10y ago
  Car factory workers used to identify as "middle class;" probably still do at least of they are Union.
  - taivare 10y ago
    The new hires at the G.M. plant in Lordstown Oh. are only starting at $15.hr.They now have the line separated by a fence new hires on one side old-timers on the other , the old timers are making between $28. to $38. hr , last I heard . . so really by old standards only the old guys our comfortably still middle class.
    - Broken_Hippo 10y ago
      And they have more applicants than job openings, and folks willing to put in lots of overtime because the car factories are the best jobs in the area. If the factory dies, the town dies. They are probably still catered to with discount apartments and other such things.
  - jakub_h 10y ago
    Which is delusional; blue collar is the archetypal working class.
    - imtringued 10y ago
      Strange, where I live they built an entire city around the car factory (VW).
      - jakub_h 10y ago
        That's possible. But historically, when you talk about the middle class, the first thing that should come to your mind is executives, surgeons and lawyers, not car assembly line workers.
- dragontamer 10y ago
  > No, if you belong to the working class or the upper class, you most definitely don't think of yourself as middle class. That's utter baloney. I know people with $150,000 / year combined income who think of themselves as middle class, despite being in the upper 10% of income in this country.
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    Without saying where they live that's meaningless. In San Francisco they are not even upper middle class, if at all, and they will be struggling even with their 150k. But even in cheaper areas, 150k to me is middle class. The problem is that wealth/income is not normally distributed! It is heavily - heavily! - skewed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM I would not worry about any family with <250k annual income when thinking about "what do we do about the uneven distribution of income", I would let those people be. They are not the problem. Look at the top 0.01% (see http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21631129-it-001-who-are-really-getting-ahead-america-forget-1 http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21631129...).
    - dragontamer 10y ago
      Median household income in San Francisco is $83k. See this for details: http://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/california/san-francisco/ http://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/california/san-francisco... Even in the Bay Area (which these two are NOT in), they are making DOUBLE the typical Bay-Area median household. You can't make DOUBLE the amount of money of the median family and then claim to be "middle class". It just doesn't work that way. And FYI: there's a reason why there's a ton of anti-gentrification going on in San Francisco. The actual middle-class, who is trying to live on ~$80k combined income in that region, is not able to find a house (let alone the lower-class, who will earn much less than the median)
      - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
        My family makes significantly over 150k per year, and we still consider ourselves middle class. Class isn't about income, it's about values and culture, as numerous articles linked elsewhere in the comments explain.
superuser2 10y ago
There are meaningful qualitative and cultural differences between, say, late-career professionals with owned homes and 401ks sufficient to maintain standard of living in retirement vs. people who could maintain that lifestyle or better without even working. That's kind of why we use the term upper middle class - to distinguish true average incomes from educated professionals (law/engineering/accounting/teaching/ middle management and formerly journalism) from landed aristocracy and CEOs of Fortune 100s.
orthoganol 10y ago
For what it's worth "Upper middle class" is a pretty widely used classification. I couldn't give a technical definition and don't even know if one exists, but as someone a little younger it's always seemed like a semi-cohesive group. People who are able to attend private schools and $160/4 year college programs, whose parents can float them a little if needed, who have a certain range of hobbies (e.g. yoga, skiing), who wear a certain range of fashion brands, who typically live in certain neighborhoods of cities. Some of those properties on their own don't define the group, take it as a whole. It's basically where your family is doing well and set you up with a lot of opportunities, but you're not extremely rich and you still have to work. It's most people I went to university with (which is a competitive, expensive one), and it's most people I know paying market rate rent here in SF.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  $160/4 year college programs? Where are these bargains?
  - wutbrodo 10y ago
    I assume that was meant to be $160k
    - copperx 10y ago
      I assumed that the OP knew that it was 160k/4 years and still found it a good deal.
rm999 10y ago
I'm confused, I just read the report in the article and everything you're saying seems to be wrong. Are you referring to a different report than this one? http://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-incomes-upper-middle-class http://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-i... >The study appears to define "middle" as 90% of respondents Where do they do this? I think they just defined the lower boundary as the federal poverty level of 30k and the upper bound as where "rich" starts. Seems totally reasonable to me. > In the latter case, the study literally uses "people who identify as rich".... The obvious definition would be percentiles of income The study did use a percentile, it did not define rich people as "people who identify as rich". It looked at the approximate percentile of people who self-identify as rich (1-2%) and then found a round number (350k) that was in the range of that percentile (1.8%). This seems perfectly reasonable to me. And arguing about 1% vs 1.5% vs 2% is pointless because as I always say, arbitrary-in arbitrary-out; neither is more or less "correct" than the other. Apologies if we're referring to different reports.
- mwsherman 10y ago
  We’re referring to the same report and thanks for being rigorous on this. I certainly wouldn’t want to oversimplify. Using self-identified rich to derive an income baseline for rich still means “rich” is self-identified, no? It still puts us in the 1-2% range. I suggest that a measurable definition of rich should be those who are clearly above the vast majority of (say) incomes. Being richer than 80% or 90% of the population makes one closer to the top than the middle, so that seems like a better definition of “rich”. Agree that it is necessarily arbitrary, but I think such a definition is pretty conservative. Regarding the 90%, it’s from this line: > about 9 out of 10 respondents identified as being in one of the three parts of the middle class But re-reading, yes you’re right that the lower bound is not self-identified. But the author’s using the $30K number (from the poverty line) puts us at around the 5th percentile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#Distribution_of_household_income_in_2014_according_to_US_Census_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United... …which effectively puts the “middle” classes at 90% of the population. Again, thanks for the rigor and let me know if I have misread.
  - 10y ago
bradleyjg 10y ago
Having read your comment six hours after you made it and many that follow, I find it telling that in response to your complaint that the definitions of middle class and rich are made up in the article, you have a bunch of people coming in and making up definitions seemingly based on little more than their gut feelings of what the terms should mean. If there's nothing approaching a consensus about what given words or phrases mean then perhaps they shouldn't be used.
HappyFunGuy 10y ago
This is why we use numbers instead of words when describing easily measured things, like income in $. Easy to graph, easy to see. Words are no friend in issues of class.
forkandwait 10y ago
I think the best definition of class is "functional" -- what category of function do you have in the society. I see four big categories (from the top): own the society (nobility, big capitalists), administrate the society for the owners (lawyers, teachers, bureaucrats, computer programmers etc), move objects around (carpenters, forklift drivers, janitors), do criminal stuff for the society (prostitutes, drug dealers, hit men). There are different levels of skill within each, which can make a big difference in the life of the person.

henrikschroder 10y ago

No, if you belong to the working class or the upper class, you most definitely don't think of yourself as middle class. Wealth and income aren't very good markers for class, there are plenty of working class members who make more money than many middle class members.

ceras 10y ago
Are you from outside the US? I've never heard this attitude in the US, but have heard it multiple times from people from other countries (often the UK). Here in the US I've heard families earning from $30k to $200k, working jobs from manual labor to white collar, call themselves "middle class."
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > Here in the US I've heard families earning from $30k to $200k, working jobs from manual labor to white collar, call themselves "middle class." $200K is definitely considered middle class in the US, especially by the left. For example, both Clinton and Sanders use $250K as their upper limit[0]. As for manual labor vs. white collar - it depends on what context you're talking about, but in terms of sheer economic purchasing power, that doesn't really matter that much. (Incidentally, a lot of white-collar office jobs pay a lot less than many blue-collar positions). There's definitely a class and status aspect to the term 'middle class', but that's much harder to quantify (and is also only loosely correlated with income - hence the existence of the term nouveau riche. As an aside, $200K isn't necessarily as much as people think it is, which is (one of the reasons) why people like Clinton and Sanders consider $250K to be middle class[1]. A lot of people who "make" $200K in gross income are often working jobs which require them to cover a lot of large expenses (such as vehicles/equipment) out-of-pocket, or are running their own businesses[2]. While they might seem rich if you just look at the $200K figure, that doesn't mean they're really rich in any meaningful sense of the word - even if they're frugal, they could still be living quite hand-to-mouth on that amount. [0] http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/18/news/economy/clinton-sanders-middle-class/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/18/news/economy/clinton-sanders... [1] There are more cynical, political reasons for doing it as well, but there is a factual justification for it as well. [2] I'm not talking about startups, but genuine 'small businesses', for which they're often the sole proprietor or one of very few partners.
  - refurb 10y ago
    $200K is definitely considered middle class in the US, especially by the Democrats. I think that has more to do with politics than economics. $250K is an income limit that is politically expedient. To call yourself middle class when you're making 5x the media household income is kinda silly. And yes, I know many live in HCOL areas. A lot of people who "make" $200K in gross income are often working jobs which require them to cover a lot of large expenses (such as vehicles/equipment) out-of-pocket, or are running their own businesses[2]. This doesn't make any sense to me. Your gross income is your gross income. Nobody reports what their business revenue is as gross income. You need to take out expenses first.
    - gozur88 10y ago
      >To call yourself middle class when you're making 5x the media household income is kinda silly. And yes, I know many live in HCOL areas. Cost of living matters a whole lot, though. You'd have a higher standard of living in Cleveland at $100k than in San Francisco at $250k.
      - jacobolus 10y ago
        > You'd have a higher standard of living in Cleveland at $100k than in San Francisco at $250k. That’s a hyperbolic exaggeration. If you pay for a 2 bedroom apartment, transportation, food (even if the SF person only shops at Whole Foods or wherever), utilities, comparable health insurance, etc., then the SF person on a $250k salary is going to have considerably more left over to spend on whatever else they want.
        ktRolster 10y ago
        If you pay for a 2 bedroom apartment, transportation, food The price of a two bedroom apartment in SF will get you a 3,000 sq ft house with a quarter acre of land elsewhere.
        douche 10y ago
- Houshalter 10y ago
  Here is a good essay which discusses why social class is a distinct concept to economic class: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/30/staying-classy/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/30/staying-classy/ I think it's a very useful distinction. I've seen similar things in demographic statistics. Where e.g. parents education was more predictive of their child's outcome than their income. Career choice and success is somewhat noisy and random.
  - henrikschroder 10y ago
    The underlying article by Siderea is absolutely fantastic as well. Must-read before any discussions of class!
- chrisseaton 10y ago
  In the UK you can be a millionaire and be working class, or be destitute and middle class. It's about more than money.
- henrikschroder 10y ago
  Yes, I'm not from the US, and yes, I'm always astounded by americans who think that your income bracket defines your class. > Here in the US I've heard families earning from $30k to $200k, working jobs from manual labor to white collar, call themselves "middle class." Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Where I'm from, the most important marker for middle class is that you value education very highly, and that you don't value physical labour above any kind of work. Obviously, the people in your example at the low end of the pay scale would most likely be lower middle class, and those at the upper would be upper middle class. The major distinctions between those would be how to perform social interactions and the size of their social networks, but they all agree that life's goal is to send your kids through college. (As opposed to being working class which means you do not value education highly, and you value physical labour ("real work!") higher than any other kind of work.)
  - WalterSear 10y ago
    The american definition of middle class is "there shows on TV that are about people like me."
    - nwjtkjn 10y ago
      Huh? There is an abundance of shows in America about rich people.
    - henrikschroder 10y ago
      That's obviously false since american TV shows portray people of pretty much every social class.
      - WalterSear 10y ago
        Right. And if they aren't in prison, they are all middle class.
      - ForHackernews 10y ago
        They do? What American TV shows focus on the poor or the working class? Other than Roseanne (which went off the air in 1997) I struggle to think of one.
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  Economic class is not just a function of income. The definition of middle-class is someone whose economic survival and security are reasonably assured. If you're middle-class, you usually aren't worrying where your next dollar is coming from. You have at least a little discretionary spending money. You have some free time. In a rural area, where the cost of living is very low (and maybe you raise some of your own food), that might be possible on $30k. In the city it's likely to take at least twice that. Conversely, as long as you have to work to maintain your lifestyle, you're middle-class, not upper-class. Even if you're making $600k, if quitting your job is not a realistic option because of the mortgage on your mansion, the payments on your Ferrari, and a couple of failed investments -- you're middle-class. You're way at the upper end of the middle class, but you're still middle-class. Now, certainly, if you're making $600k and you're reasonably careful with your money, you have a golden opportunity to make investments that can, in a relatively short time, put you into the upper class. But you're not there until you have enough passive income to live on indefinitely.
  - gizmo 10y ago
    That's a very American perspective. In the UK a Duke or Earl can be close to broke, but nobles and gentry will always be considered upper class. In contrast lottery winners, successful plumbers or grocers and other businessmen will almost never become upper class, even if they are independently wealthy.
    - charlesdm 10y ago
      Right. In Europe, it also often has to do with status. For example, you can make €25m and still not be accepted by the "upper class" (i.e. wealthy "old" nobility), because you are seen as not sophisticated enough. On the other hand, decent wealth builders (but not crazy rich) people can still be accepted in the upper class because they share certain values and habits. A lot of old noblemen look down on the capitalists / nouveau riche. At the same time, the realise they need capitalists to help them generate decent yields on their inherited fortunes. It's an interesting world at the top. Some are accepted into the group, and others are not. Source: my mom is friends with several people who carry a title.
jwatte 10y ago
Car factory workers used to identify as "middle class;" probably still do at least of they are Union.
- taivare 10y ago
  The new hires at the G.M. plant in Lordstown Oh. are only starting at $15.hr.They now have the line separated by a fence new hires on one side old-timers on the other , the old timers are making between $28. to $38. hr , last I heard . . so really by old standards only the old guys our comfortably still middle class.
  - Broken_Hippo 10y ago
    And they have more applicants than job openings, and folks willing to put in lots of overtime because the car factories are the best jobs in the area. If the factory dies, the town dies. They are probably still catered to with discount apartments and other such things.
- jakub_h 10y ago
  Which is delusional; blue collar is the archetypal working class.
  - imtringued 10y ago
    Strange, where I live they built an entire city around the car factory (VW).
    - jakub_h 10y ago
      That's possible. But historically, when you talk about the middle class, the first thing that should come to your mind is executives, surgeons and lawyers, not car assembly line workers.
dragontamer 10y ago
> No, if you belong to the working class or the upper class, you most definitely don't think of yourself as middle class. That's utter baloney. I know people with $150,000 / year combined income who think of themselves as middle class, despite being in the upper 10% of income in this country.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  Without saying where they live that's meaningless. In San Francisco they are not even upper middle class, if at all, and they will be struggling even with their 150k. But even in cheaper areas, 150k to me is middle class. The problem is that wealth/income is not normally distributed! It is heavily - heavily! - skewed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM I would not worry about any family with <250k annual income when thinking about "what do we do about the uneven distribution of income", I would let those people be. They are not the problem. Look at the top 0.01% (see http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21631129-it-001-who-are-really-getting-ahead-america-forget-1 http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21631129...).
  - dragontamer 10y ago
    Median household income in San Francisco is $83k. See this for details: http://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/california/san-francisco/ http://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/california/san-francisco... Even in the Bay Area (which these two are NOT in), they are making DOUBLE the typical Bay-Area median household. You can't make DOUBLE the amount of money of the median family and then claim to be "middle class". It just doesn't work that way. And FYI: there's a reason why there's a ton of anti-gentrification going on in San Francisco. The actual middle-class, who is trying to live on ~$80k combined income in that region, is not able to find a house (let alone the lower-class, who will earn much less than the median)
    - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
      My family makes significantly over 150k per year, and we still consider ourselves middle class. Class isn't about income, it's about values and culture, as numerous articles linked elsewhere in the comments explain.

superuser2 10y ago

There are meaningful qualitative and cultural differences between, say, late-career professionals with owned homes and 401ks sufficient to maintain standard of living in retirement vs. people who could maintain that lifestyle or better without even working. That's kind of why we use the term upper middle class - to distinguish true average incomes from educated professionals (law/engineering/accounting/teaching/ middle management and formerly journalism) from landed aristocracy and CEOs of Fortune 100s.

orthoganol 10y ago

For what it's worth "Upper middle class" is a pretty widely used classification. I couldn't give a technical definition and don't even know if one exists, but as someone a little younger it's always seemed like a semi-cohesive group. People who are able to attend private schools and $160/4 year college programs, whose parents can float them a little if needed, who have a certain range of hobbies (e.g. yoga, skiing), who wear a certain range of fashion brands, who typically live in certain neighborhoods of cities. Some of those properties on their own don't define the group, take it as a whole. It's basically where your family is doing well and set you up with a lot of opportunities, but you're not extremely rich and you still have to work. It's most people I went to university with (which is a competitive, expensive one), and it's most people I know paying market rate rent here in SF.

dexterdog 10y ago
$160/4 year college programs? Where are these bargains?
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  I assume that was meant to be $160k
  - copperx 10y ago
    I assumed that the OP knew that it was 160k/4 years and still found it a good deal.

rm999 10y ago

I'm confused, I just read the report in the article and everything you're saying seems to be wrong. Are you referring to a different report than this one? http://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-incomes-upper-middle-class http://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-i... >The study appears to define "middle" as 90% of respondents Where do they do this? I think they just defined the lower boundary as the federal poverty level of 30k and the upper bound as where "rich" starts. Seems totally reasonable to me. > In the latter case, the study literally uses "people who identify as rich".... The obvious definition would be percentiles of income The study did use a percentile, it did not define rich people as "people who identify as rich". It looked at the approximate percentile of people who self-identify as rich (1-2%) and then found a round number (350k) that was in the range of that percentile (1.8%). This seems perfectly reasonable to me. And arguing about 1% vs 1.5% vs 2% is pointless because as I always say, arbitrary-in arbitrary-out; neither is more or less "correct" than the other. Apologies if we're referring to different reports.

mwsherman 10y ago
We’re referring to the same report and thanks for being rigorous on this. I certainly wouldn’t want to oversimplify. Using self-identified rich to derive an income baseline for rich still means “rich” is self-identified, no? It still puts us in the 1-2% range. I suggest that a measurable definition of rich should be those who are clearly above the vast majority of (say) incomes. Being richer than 80% or 90% of the population makes one closer to the top than the middle, so that seems like a better definition of “rich”. Agree that it is necessarily arbitrary, but I think such a definition is pretty conservative. Regarding the 90%, it’s from this line: > about 9 out of 10 respondents identified as being in one of the three parts of the middle class But re-reading, yes you’re right that the lower bound is not self-identified. But the author’s using the $30K number (from the poverty line) puts us at around the 5th percentile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#Distribution_of_household_income_in_2014_according_to_US_Census_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United... …which effectively puts the “middle” classes at 90% of the population. Again, thanks for the rigor and let me know if I have misread.
- 10y ago

bradleyjg 10y ago

Having read your comment six hours after you made it and many that follow, I find it telling that in response to your complaint that the definitions of middle class and rich are made up in the article, you have a bunch of people coming in and making up definitions seemingly based on little more than their gut feelings of what the terms should mean. If there's nothing approaching a consensus about what given words or phrases mean then perhaps they shouldn't be used.

HappyFunGuy 10y ago

This is why we use numbers instead of words when describing easily measured things, like income in $. Easy to graph, easy to see. Words are no friend in issues of class.

forkandwait 10y ago

I think the best definition of class is "functional" -- what category of function do you have in the society. I see four big categories (from the top): own the society (nobility, big capitalists), administrate the society for the owners (lawyers, teachers, bureaucrats, computer programmers etc), move objects around (carpenters, forklift drivers, janitors), do criminal stuff for the society (prostitutes, drug dealers, hit men). There are different levels of skill within each, which can make a big difference in the life of the person.