>Using self-identified rich to derive an income baseline for rich still means “rich” is self-identified, no? I don't agree with this - I know a guy who makes 5

>Using self-identified rich to derive an income baseline for rich still means “rich” is self-identified, no? I don't agree with this - I know a guy who makes 500k a year who considers himself "upper middle class", but this report would classify him (probably rightfully so) as rich. I think of the self-identified part as a principled way of defining something arbitrary. In my job I do a lot of analysis that needs to be boiled down to easy-to-understand metrics and definitions, and I personally feel this is the best approach when there isn't a good standard definition. A simple percentile wouldn't work here because the whole point of the study is looking at how income/class has changed over time. >the author’s using the $30K number (from the poverty line) puts us at around the 5th percentile Note that 30k is a normalized "family-of-three equivalent", which isn't the same as household income. It's actually a pretty neat way to remove size-of-family effects (which changed over the period of the analysis). Figure 2 shows about 20% of people would fall below middle class in 2014, and 24% in 1979. >Again, thanks for the rigor No worries and glad to, I love reading these kinds of studies!