giving me a permanent marker of upper-class status and a near guarantee of material comfort. Someone needs to let the author in on the bad news. Many people w

giving me a permanent marker of upper-class status and a near guarantee of material comfort. Someone needs to let the author in on the bad news. Many people whose parents pay the full tuition of $50,000 to $60,000 per year have, without any hint of irony or discrepancy, described themselves to me as “middle class.” Because by certain perfectly reasonable definitions, they are middle class. The problem is, the author is trying to measure middle class by very different metrics - those of his parents, and via the statistical interpretations that support that position. But whatever 'most' people in the 'middle' of the economic scale make for almost meaningless metric for a social class, which is driven as much by the outcomes of that income allow as by the relative size of your slice of the pie. The problem is that while his parents >were< middle class, if you take 'middle class' to mean the relative freedom and safety that it once stood for, his parents aren't that any more. The country has progressed technologically, and regressed as a society, and the independence and security that was once afforded the middle class is no longer available via the channels that his parents started out on. But, admitting this would involve admitting that the precious society of his childhood was complicit in it's own demise, which, in some parts of the country, is quite literally inconceivable.