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Can you define what the middle class is? What income range?
Posted on: July 28, 2016 at 14:46:12 CT
Spanky KU
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Sure The Middle Class Is Shrinking: 30% Of Americans Are Now Too Rich To Be In The Middle Class
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/21/sure-the-middle-class-is-shrinking-30-of-americans-are-too-rich-to-be-middle-class-now/#5b4d68402a60
A very interesting report on America’s shrinking middle class shows, once again, that the middle class is shrinking. And, once again, we see that the middle class is shrinking because people are getting too rich to be considered middle class any more. And if we’re honest, the idea that too many people are getting too rich isn’t something that is going to keep us awake at night.
We might worry if everyone were becoming too poor to be middle class. We might even worry if one person gets all the goodies leaving some monstrous multiple of those who remain middle class. But that whole swathes of the society are climbing up out of the petty bourgeois lifestyle into the haute bourgeois one shouldn’t be causing any night sweats.
It’s actually what we’d like to be happening to everyone in fact. The mixture of capitalism and free markets has meant that, in places which have actually been doing those things for more than a few decades, we’ve entirely destroyed the peasant and then proletarian lifestyles of yore.
ADVERTISING
Seriously, what is wrong with the idea of a society where more people have the resources to live a decent life?
As the WSJ says:
The latest piece of evidence comes from economist Stephen Rose of the Urban Institute, who finds in new research that the upper middle class in the U.S. is larger and richer than it’s ever been. He finds the upper middle class has expanded from about 12% of the population in 1979 to a new record of nearly 30% as of 2014.
‘Any discussion of inequality that is limited to the 1% misses a lot of the picture because it ignores the large inequality between the growing upper middle class and the middle and lower middle classes,’ said Mr. Rose. The Urban Institute is a nonpartisan policy research group.
I’ve said a number of times that I’m not very worried by inequality but I am worried about absolute standards of living. I would be unhappy if some number of people were getting richer because others were getting poorer. However, that appears not to be the case:
middleclass
That slight decline in the bottom incomes is because these are market incomes. The changes and expansions of the welfare system have more than made up for that over those years. So, all incomes are growing, and some are growing faster than others. That leads to the sizes of the different classes changing:
middleclass1
It is worth pointing out why this is different from Pew Research’s recent results. Pew were measuring middle class as a relative term: 60% of median income to twice median income. Thus the change in the size of the various classes is a reflection of how inequality is changing. Here the measurement is an absolute income level. And thus we’re including both that widening of inequality and also the fact that large parts of the country are becoming richer.
I urge you to read the report.
The truth is that the American middle class is shrinking. But the major cause of this is that large parts of the population are simply becoming too rich to be considered middle class any more. And I think that’s great. I cannot bring myself to complain about 30% of Americans now living better and richer lives than their forbears did.
Besides, isn’t that what we’re all actually trying to achieve? We should be celebrating the evidence that we’re succeeding.
Edited by Spanky at 14:51:50 on 07/28/16
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/21/sure-the-middle-class-is-shrinking-30-of-americans-are-too-rich-to-be-middle-class-now/#5b4d68402a60
A very interesting report on America’s shrinking middle class shows, once again, that the middle class is shrinking. And, once again, we see that the middle class is shrinking because people are getting too rich to be considered middle class any more. And if we’re honest, the idea that too many people are getting too rich isn’t something that is going to keep us awake at night.
We might worry if everyone were becoming too poor to be middle class. We might even worry if one person gets all the goodies leaving some monstrous multiple of those who remain middle class. But that whole swathes of the society are climbing up out of the petty bourgeois lifestyle into the haute bourgeois one shouldn’t be causing any night sweats.
It’s actually what we’d like to be happening to everyone in fact. The mixture of capitalism and free markets has meant that, in places which have actually been doing those things for more than a few decades, we’ve entirely destroyed the peasant and then proletarian lifestyles of yore.
ADVERTISING
Seriously, what is wrong with the idea of a society where more people have the resources to live a decent life?
As the WSJ says:
The latest piece of evidence comes from economist Stephen Rose of the Urban Institute, who finds in new research that the upper middle class in the U.S. is larger and richer than it’s ever been. He finds the upper middle class has expanded from about 12% of the population in 1979 to a new record of nearly 30% as of 2014.
‘Any discussion of inequality that is limited to the 1% misses a lot of the picture because it ignores the large inequality between the growing upper middle class and the middle and lower middle classes,’ said Mr. Rose. The Urban Institute is a nonpartisan policy research group.
I’ve said a number of times that I’m not very worried by inequality but I am worried about absolute standards of living. I would be unhappy if some number of people were getting richer because others were getting poorer. However, that appears not to be the case:
middleclass
That slight decline in the bottom incomes is because these are market incomes. The changes and expansions of the welfare system have more than made up for that over those years. So, all incomes are growing, and some are growing faster than others. That leads to the sizes of the different classes changing:
middleclass1
It is worth pointing out why this is different from Pew Research’s recent results. Pew were measuring middle class as a relative term: 60% of median income to twice median income. Thus the change in the size of the various classes is a reflection of how inequality is changing. Here the measurement is an absolute income level. And thus we’re including both that widening of inequality and also the fact that large parts of the country are becoming richer.
I urge you to read the report.
The truth is that the American middle class is shrinking. But the major cause of this is that large parts of the population are simply becoming too rich to be considered middle class any more. And I think that’s great. I cannot bring myself to complain about 30% of Americans now living better and richer lives than their forbears did.
Besides, isn’t that what we’re all actually trying to achieve? We should be celebrating the evidence that we’re succeeding.
Edited by Spanky at 14:51:50 on 07/28/16
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Can you define what the middle class is? What income range? - Spanky KU - 7/28 14:46:12