Vanishing middle class at 4M....down from 12M in 2000

http://www.nypost.com/seven/07112009/business/the_vanishing_class_178755.htm

4 5 17 years ago

quoderat• 17 years ago

The plutocrats don't seem to realize that in gutting the economy, they will also eventually gut themselves. Goldman Sachs, I am looking at you.

Gordon Gekko was supposed to be a satire, not an exemplar of how to live.

gaius• 17 years ago

Class is a lot more than income. It's a value system, participation in different institutions of civil society, behavioral norms, language used, dietary preferences, and more. Maybe it's different in the US but here in the UK, working class with money is still working class (I don't mean this in a perjorative sense, e.g. a working class man who makes his fortune won't suddenly start eating foie gras and going foxhunting), upper class is still upper class in poverty (e.g. an artistocrat who loses her estate won't suddenly start drinking pints of bitter and going on holiday to Ibiza). It's not 'til grandchildren that a family's class really changes. Even if the middle class becomes poorer, it won't lose its values (e.g. belief in education) that created it in the first place.

gjm11• 17 years ago

This looks to be mostly is about the following thing from Demos: http://www.demos.org/publication.cfm?currentpublicationID=8D...

... which seems to be all about the state of the US middle class in 2006. (I see no sign of anything based on more recent figures, though I could have missed something. The NY Post article says the 4M figure is from Demos in 2008, but I don't know where they found it.)

The 12M and 4M figures are not for the total size of the middle class, but for the portion of it deemed to be "secure" in the middle class -- i.e., at little risk of falling out of the middle class. That's supposedly on the order of 1/3 of the whole middle class.

Curiously, the Demos document and the NY Post article are both about the alleged scarily large fraction of the US middle class that's in danger of dropping out of the middle class, which has supposedly got scarily larger over recent years; but neither sees fit to say what's actually happened to the size of the middle class. I'd have thought that if lots of middle-class people, and increasingly many at that, are at serious risk of ceasing to be middle-class, then that ought to show up as attrition in the number of middle-class people.

There's also no definition of "middle-class" offered. It seems to me so vague a term that anything said about "the middle class" is useless without some indication of just what notion of "middle class" is being used.

anamax• 17 years ago

> There's also no definition of "middle-class" offered. It seems to me so vague a term that anything said about "the middle class" is useless without some indication of just what notion of "middle class" is being used.

Yup, that's a huge problem.

The US population is roughly 300M. It's unclear how "middle" can be defined in a way that leads to less than 100M or so people. (An absolute definition is absurd, because it leads to no middle class 50 years ago and everyone "upper class" in another 50. A relative definition will be roughly stable in population, regardless of circumstance.)

There's probably a "the middle class is in a different economic situation" argument to be made, but that's not nearly as much "fun" for a journalist.

hvs• 17 years ago

The title of this post is misleading. Even the article states that there are 31 million families in the middle class. It further states that while 12mm families were "solidly middle class" (whatever that means) in 2000, only 8mm families were so in 2006. It then states that 4mm more families are in danger of sliding into poverty based on 2008 estimates.

Vanishing middle class at 4M....down from 12M in 2000

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