It's so hard to think about class in the United States

[firecat]

snippy posted about an interactive feature on CNN.com that attempts to determine whether you, a person residing in the US, can correctly identify whether you count as "middle-class."

Here is the gist of the comment I left over at snippy's post:

Income is not a great gauge of class by itself. Net worth matters a LOT.

Have you read The Millionaire Next Door? One of the main themes is that some professionals with high incomes believe that appearing wealthy is an important part of their professional reputation. So they have big houses, expensive cars and clothes, and are deep in debt. Some rich people think it's important to save money, so they have lots of assets but they don't live in fancy houses, drive beat-up cars, etc. (The book is rather simplistic in its judgements but I agree that those patterns exist.)

Those rich folks and professionals might have similar gross incomes. But are they the same class?

They are defining "middle class" where I live as a household income of $68,420—$107,815.

They're counting it as the middle fifth of income, which means they're assuming five classes. One wonders what the results would be like if they took the middle third of income (I suspect the results would be more boring, although I'm sure some people would define themselves as middle class when they aren't in the middle third of income).

Comments

[marahmarie]

Huh, interesting. My immediate family wound up in a subsidized neighborhood by the time I was 10 or 11 - me, my mom and my sister. It was mostly black and of course we were white, so we learned to adapt. Once I got into my teens I actually liked living there; I liked being exposed to another culture and way of life (and the music! I loved the music!) and I felt I was safer there in some ways than people in some of the nearby white bastion communities who actually had something to worry about in terms of losing things of value through robberies or whatever (as in, I knew they were targets for anything nefarious, while generally we were not).

Don't get me wrong: overall it could be a pretty bad neighborhood, especially depending on who was in it at any given time, and got so bad that 18+ years later we had to leave because the crime and ugliness was just through the roof, but it really wasn't too bad when I was growing up. My best male friend was one of my neighbors there, a black guy my age who was my boyfriend's best friend, as well. It felt very culturally mixed and appropriate, like perhaps the melting pot dream had finally come true. Our country has an awful long way to go before that actually happens, of course, but I was still glad - and still am glad - for at least being exposed to that kind of diversity from a fairly young age.