What Middle Class Means: A Never-Ending, Never-Resolving Conversation

You might think Israel-Palestine represents an intractable problem, or that social security does, but the real question we will never answer is, What actually, objectively makes a person middle class?

Well, in today’s installment of the conversational equivalent of an infinity sign, we have writer Bryce Covert vs. candidate Hillary Clinton. Let’s get it started, y’all.

Mrs. Clinton is using a definition of middle class that has long been popular among Democratic policy makers, from her husband to Barack Obama when he was a candidate: any household that makes $250,000 or less a year. Yet this definition is completely out of touch with reality. … Those families who make $250,000 a year belong to an elite group: Americans who earn enough to be in the highest 5 percent of the income distribution.

Damn right families that bring in $250K a year belong to an elite group: people who can bring in $250K a year.

It does seem hard to justify describing anyone in the top 5% of income distribution as being “middle”-anything, except maybe middle of the top, I guess? On the other hand, because people who make $250K a year tend to live among even richer people in expensive areas, they may well feel middle-class when compared to their neighbors.

“Class” is nearly meaningless if it only takes income into account. It’s a much more sophisticated construct of background, wealth, education, experiences, expectations, and so on. If you’re the only one in your family to go to college, you may end up feeling like you end up in a different class; but you also might never feel as secure in that new class as your peers there who took access to college for granted.

Consider this thought-provoking piece on Medium by Due Quach, “Poor and Traumatized at Harvard”:

The most frustrating thing is that the people who treated me didn’t focus on helping me learn effective methods to handle the circumstances causing my high stress: that my family still lived with extreme financial hardship, that I didn’t want to be a burden on them, that I felt responsible for helping them and guilty for not being there to help them, and that going to Harvard did not directly translate into putting me in a better position to financially support them.

Here’s a piece that addresses some of the challenges faced by first-generation college students, so that the experience doesn’t have to be quite as traumatic as some have found it.

The Financial Times has also put together an interesting series about the contemporary American middle class in its various guises. It analyzes data from the recent Pew report and makes the by-now-pretty-standard argument for higher education.

A key factor driving the wedge between successful Americans and those who are struggling is the outsized premium the labour market places on skills and higher education. College graduates are eight times likelier to live in the upper income tiers than adults who did not finish high school, and twice as likely as an adult who has only a high school diploma, Pew finds.

“Those Americans without a college degree stand out as experiencing a substantial loss in economic status,” the report says.

Yeah, well, see above.

It also profiles individuals, including a public school teacher in Virginia who has to live an hour drive away from where she works and squeeze in a second job at a winery (“‘I could do so much more if I were able to live in the community where I teach’”) and a factory worker in Indiana for whom everything is and will stay good — as long as the plant doesn’t close.

Ultimately class is more informed by feelings than by facts such as income. Do you feel secure, do you feel comfortable, like you’re on relatively sure financial footing and you can be confident in your ability to do the things you want for yourself and your family? Could you scrounge together enough cash to cover a $500 emergency? What about a medical emergency?

Confidence becomes the greatest, and most elusive, luxury item of all.