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

[necturus]

To me, "middle class" conjures up images of Fred Flintstone, the person from a working-class background who has risen to some degree of affluence. But I think that in reality there are only two classes: those who make their living by their own labor, and those who exploit the labor of others. I use the word "exploit" deliberately, so as to exclude from the latter class productive individuals who accumulate some investments over a lifetime of work. The exploiter class I have in mind is small, disproportionately wealthy, and derives its wealth more from speculation than true investment. The rest of us are all working-class, whether white-collar or blue-collar, rural or urban, professional or tradesperson, union or non-union, regardless of zip code, accent, skin color, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or faith.