2 ms·

If it’s harder than why are there so many more people in the upper middle class today? Look at the data. It points to the opposite of what you believe. If it we

If it’s harder than why are there so many more people in the upper middle class today? Look at the data. It points to the opposite of what you believe. If it were harder then there would be fewer people in the upper middle class when it fact it is continuing to expand. We have been fed narratives for political reasons. But they aren’t true.

bumby 6y ago
Revisit their definition of “middle class”. It’s income based, not quantile based. Meaning it may be both possible that there are more people making $100k and simultaneously many much lower. Meaning a bimodal distribution with relatively fewer near the statistical average. That disparity is the what the research referenced in the article concludes. That inequality shouldn’t necessarily be equated with “things are better now” which is what the article title seems to imply.
bumby 6y ago
I had some time to dig deeper into the methodology of the paper used as the basis of the claim. One curious thing they did was normalize income in a way that a single person making $58k/yr was counted as making $100k/yr by the nature of them being single. Now that makes some sense in the context of the way poverty is defined in part by the number of heads in a household, but it can certainly be misleading when defining classes by income. Here’s the strange part to me: a couple with no kids need $163k combined to meet upper class. Add me kid to the mix and they need $256k combined. According to their methodology, these all equate to the same standard of living. This ends up skewing the intuition of the definition of “upper middle class”. Traditionally, the top quintile means you are upper middle class. By this definition it requires about $87k/yr. This is exactly 50% above the papers definition for a single person. I’m not saying their method is wrong, just that it doesn’t fit with how we traditionally talk about economic classes.
- bumby 6y ago
  I misread part of the study. The “each” part was for each household, so you’d have to cut those numbers in half for the $163k and $256k statement above

bumby 6y ago

Revisit their definition of “middle class”. It’s income based, not quantile based. Meaning it may be both possible that there are more people making $100k and simultaneously many much lower. Meaning a bimodal distribution with relatively fewer near the statistical average. That disparity is the what the research referenced in the article concludes. That inequality shouldn’t necessarily be equated with “things are better now” which is what the article title seems to imply.

bumby 6y ago

I had some time to dig deeper into the methodology of the paper used as the basis of the claim. One curious thing they did was normalize income in a way that a single person making $58k/yr was counted as making $100k/yr by the nature of them being single. Now that makes some sense in the context of the way poverty is defined in part by the number of heads in a household, but it can certainly be misleading when defining classes by income. Here’s the strange part to me: a couple with no kids need $163k combined to meet upper class. Add me kid to the mix and they need $256k combined. According to their methodology, these all equate to the same standard of living. This ends up skewing the intuition of the definition of “upper middle class”. Traditionally, the top quintile means you are upper middle class. By this definition it requires about $87k/yr. This is exactly 50% above the papers definition for a single person. I’m not saying their method is wrong, just that it doesn’t fit with how we traditionally talk about economic classes.

bumby 6y ago
I misread part of the study. The “each” part was for each household, so you’d have to cut those numbers in half for the $163k and $256k statement above