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What does the proportion of the population have to do with whether it's truly middle-class? Is it not (along a logarithmic scale) a halfway point between povert

What does the proportion of the population have to do with whether it's truly middle-class? Is it not (along a logarithmic scale) a halfway point between poverty and truly rich?

kentrado 5y ago
Halfway along a logarithmic scale what a beautiful way to describe it. I am surprised at accurate that image is. Where did you hear this expression?
- trylfthsk 5y ago
  The earliest usage of the idea of "log utility of wealth" I'm aware of is in Daniel Bernoulli's work on the St. Petersburg lottery [0], but it pops up all over mathematical finance stuff. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-stpetersburg/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-stpetersburg/
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Is it not (along a logarithmic scale) a halfway point between poverty and truly rich? No. Traditionally the middle class was at least as rich as the upper class. What made them a "middle class" was that they weren't highborn, like the upper classes, but they also weren't poor, like the lower classes.
legitster 5y ago
We often use "middle class" as an analogue to a "normal" experience. But in earlier periods it was clearly the exception.
- ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
  Actually "middle class" was first used in the 1700s to denote the class between the peasants and the nobles -- i.e. the merchants or bourgeoisie. As opposed to it being the "normal" experience in the strict normal distributional terms, the reality is (a) income and social status is not a normal distribution -- it is extremely right skewed and (b) given some concepts of class divisions (e.g. peasants, merchants, nobles in previous centuries or blue collar, white collar professionals, and the rick (i.e. those who's earnings from capital returns as opposed to salary) today) middle class has tended to represent the group in the middle (as opposed to the person in the middle. Thus, even if the bottom group of poor people is very very large, the middle class is not the mean of the population. This is extremely clear on our usage when we say things like "Guatemala has a very small middle class as it is mostly poor people and some old money rich people."
- c3534l 5y ago
  That sounds like a problem of people not understanding what middle class means. Its even worse than that, its a fairly basic part of history class when talking about things like the American and French revolutions. If your biggest nitpick is that the author isn't using the phrase "middle class" incorrectly, then I don't see anything to complain about.

What does the proportion of the population have to do with whether it's truly middle-class? Is it not (along a logarithmic scale) a halfway point between poverty and truly rich?

kentrado 5y ago

Halfway along a logarithmic scale what a beautiful way to describe it. I am surprised at accurate that image is. Where did you hear this expression?

trylfthsk 5y ago
The earliest usage of the idea of "log utility of wealth" I'm aware of is in Daniel Bernoulli's work on the St. Petersburg lottery [0], but it pops up all over mathematical finance stuff. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-stpetersburg/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-stpetersburg/

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> Is it not (along a logarithmic scale) a halfway point between poverty and truly rich? No. Traditionally the middle class was at least as rich as the upper class. What made them a "middle class" was that they weren't highborn, like the upper classes, but they also weren't poor, like the lower classes.

legitster 5y ago

We often use "middle class" as an analogue to a "normal" experience. But in earlier periods it was clearly the exception.

ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
Actually "middle class" was first used in the 1700s to denote the class between the peasants and the nobles -- i.e. the merchants or bourgeoisie. As opposed to it being the "normal" experience in the strict normal distributional terms, the reality is (a) income and social status is not a normal distribution -- it is extremely right skewed and (b) given some concepts of class divisions (e.g. peasants, merchants, nobles in previous centuries or blue collar, white collar professionals, and the rick (i.e. those who's earnings from capital returns as opposed to salary) today) middle class has tended to represent the group in the middle (as opposed to the person in the middle. Thus, even if the bottom group of poor people is very very large, the middle class is not the mean of the population. This is extremely clear on our usage when we say things like "Guatemala has a very small middle class as it is mostly poor people and some old money rich people."
c3534l 5y ago
That sounds like a problem of people not understanding what middle class means. Its even worse than that, its a fairly basic part of history class when talking about things like the American and French revolutions. If your biggest nitpick is that the author isn't using the phrase "middle class" incorrectly, then I don't see anything to complain about.