> and thus grew the middle class. The middle class is something we truly need to focus on growing again.
But that's the problem with things like this. We keep focusing on the top and the bottom but not the middle.
So we pass laws purporting to tax the rich (but really anyone with a full time job) and then the rich hire accountants and only the middle class pays. Then we clamor for a higher minimum wage, but the middle class already makes more than minimum wage, so the effect on them is to raise the prices they have to pay.
What we need isn't just to get the people at $10 to $15, it's to get the people at $20 to $35 or $50.
It would help enormously if we had walkable communities with cheap rentals where a single person could reasonably support themselves on local minimum wage. The dearth of affordable housing -- by which I mean market rate cheap rentals, not government subsidized housing -- is a huge factor here in growing a permanent underclass and undermining the growth of the middle class.
I wouldn't expect prices to rise significantly as automation kicks in. We will see a lot of competition and wage stagnation for those middle class jobs as efficiency eats away the margins they live on.
Hopefully we find a solution before the pitchforks come out.
America has always been a nation of middle class people, even back in colonial times. The exception was the southern slave economy, which didn't have much of a middle class.
it's a pretty big exception, even if the other part is true. (And thanks for acknowledging the exception up front!)
At the high points, 20% of the total U.S. population were enslaved. At that point, it's not just an exception, it's a problem with the entire premise, even if the entire rest of the population was 'middle class', which they weren't.
What allowed the U.S. economy to function with an unusually large portion of _white_ people being "middle class" (compared to Europe)... was all the African people who weren't. There's no reason to treat those 20% of people as not part of the U.S. economy, they were a _crucial_ part. If we were to look at what portion of the _entire_ population of the U.S. was "middle class", including those 20% enslaved people, for whatever definition of 'middle class', that'd be closer anyway. There's no reason to look at things without them though, as if they were just a footnote. 20% of the population!
It's 20% of the population of the entire country. It was probably much more than 20% in the South, indeed (in some states as high as _65%_ enslaved people at some times!), and less in the North. The North did originally have some enslaved people.
The severing of the economies at the outset of the Civil War, and the total destruction of the southern economy during the war, yet the continued prosperity of the northern economy shows that the northern economy was not dependent on slaves.
> The North did originally have some enslaved people.
Yes, and the ending of that did not retard the economy or reduce the middle class in any detectable way. The middle class increased throughout the 19th century.
Slavery was integral to the entire U.S. economy, but that economy was changing in the mid-19th century, and indeed it's not totally false that those economic changes were part of what led to the civil war.
// Capitalists in the North profited by investing in banks that handled the exchange of money for people, or in insurance companies that provided insurance for the owners’ investments in enslaved people. So did foreign investors in Southern securities, some of which were issued on mortgaged slaves. The hotbed of American abolitionism — New England — was also the home of America’s cotton textile industry, which grew rich on the backs of the enslaved people forced to pick cotton. The story of America’s domestic slave trade is not just a story about Richmond or New Orleans, but about America. //
"“In the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery—as a source of the cotton that fed Rhode Island’s mills, as a source of the wealth that filled New York’s banks, as a source of the markets that inspired Massachusetts manufacturers—proved indispensable to national economic development,” Beckert and Rockman write in the introduction to the book. “… Cotton offered a reason for entrepreneurs and inventors to build manufactories in such places as Lowell, Pawtucket, and Paterson, thereby connecting New England’s Industrial Revolution to the advancing plantation frontier of the Deep South. And financing cotton growing, as well as marketing and transporting the crop, was a source of great wealth for the nation’s merchants and banks.”"
Not sure where your drawing your data from the US does have a large working class population and always has had.
Up in the hollers you can still find some very poor working class people and its noticeable that the forces recruit from these populations (this is from conversations with USAF personnel)
So the original proposition was that "America has always been a nation of middle class people, even back in colonial times."
I'm not sure exactly what they meant. i'm not sure if "middle class people" and "working class people" are the same thing. I'm not sure if a "large working class population" contradicts "a nation of middle class people."
I interpreted the original claim as suggesting that the U.S. had _more_ "middle class people" than European nations, and had much much fewer people who were not "middle class people" compared to contemporaneous European (or other) nations. I am not sure how we define "middle class" or compare the U.S. and Europe "even in colonial times". I am sure that enslaved people were not "middle class" though.
But where I found my data that at some points ("colonial times " and shortly after) up to 20% of the entire U.S. population was enslaved people (who were obviously not "middle class" and to me present some serious problems with considering the U.S. at those times "a nation of middle-class people") by googling, and finding this: https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm
The last line is total U.S. population. We can see that in 1750, 934,340 (white) + 236,420 (black) = 1,170,760. 236,420 / 1,170,760 == 20.1%. "colonial times". 1790, specifically breaking out free vs enslaved Black people now, also roughly 20% of the total population was enslaved people. The percentage starts to go down after that, by 1860 down to "only" 12%, which is still enough people who are clearly not middle class that I'm not sure I'd want to call it a "nation of middle-class people".
Talking about a "US economy" in the antebellum years is like talking about a "European economy" today. There were vast economic and social differences between North and South because they followed fundamentally different economic models.
It's shrinking by your definition, growing by others (the poor of today are the middle class of history if you look at poverty levels, purchasing power, or class mobility).
Further, we are in a noticeable amount of ways not a free market. If I took my car engine (the free market) to a mechanic and said "It's not working after I just made a couple of random small changes to it", the mechanic would rightfully laugh me out the door because me just meddling with a complex system, even if its only a small amount, can have disastrous side effects.
Those making $200k-$500k are the new middle class. Are you making that much but only own one house? Are your cars more than 5 years old... Ding... you're in the middle class.
$200k-$500k is a massive range, and $500k is certainly not middle class. That's above the 95th percentile even in the San Jose area[0].
Just because you have to think about money sometimes doesn't make you middle class. Your neighbors having more money than you also doesn't make you middle class.
I don't understand why frugality means you're middle class. I also don't understand how $200k-$500k, a very sizable income, even in the SF bay area, is magically the middle class now
$200-500k in the SF bay area is still considered middle class because housing prices have gotten so ridiculously high.
The 2 br, 1 bath, 800 sq foot apartment I live in 3 years ago for $900/month would probably be $2,500 in SV. Likewise, the 1850 sq ft, 3 br, 2.5 bath house I live in now that I bought for $338k in 2015 would probably have been over $1,000,000 in SV.
$200-500k in the SF bay area is still considered middle class because housing prices have gotten so ridiculously high.
No, that means the middle class can't afford to live in SF. This isn't the first time I've heard this, and I don't know why anyone might think this. As a more extreme example, "middle-class in Pebble Beach is $1MM/year or $20MM net worth". No, there is no middle-class in Pebble Beach, only rich people live there.
I know I'm moving the goalposts here, but the houses in Pebble Beach aren't exactly middle-class houses, and not because of the price. A 4-bedroom, 7-bath, 5000 sqft house just isn't a middle-class home.
It's why I try to define "middle-class" by specific behaviors and possessions, not by dollar amounts.
It's not about dollars. It's about your behaviors. Behaviors of the middle class. Middle class people typically do things like own one home, work two jobs, save for their kids' college, keep their cars for a while, etc.
I wouldn't consider working two jobs to be middle class unless you meant two people in the household working one job each, unless there are a lot of people working two jobs to maintain a middle class lifestyle.
The whole lower vs middle vs upper class split is mostly a fraud. People I've had discussions with about their class in that respect are usually trying hard to make an already meaningless definition make them look great. People who work jobs like mine are always "upper middle class" in their mind.
I wanted to back you up in that you are right that it's behavior that defines classes. But it's more the part that matters, your means of producing wealth. If your money works for you or employs others to work for you, you're investment class or capitalist class. Punching a clock, or picking up a salary check means you're working class. The third class are those who slip below maintaining employment, I call them "capitalism's reserve army" but there's probably a better term for the unemployed.
These little ego boosting distinctions people come up with "upper working class" are meaningless.
Middle class isn't working two jobs. If anything, it is a couple working one job and the partner doing their own thing: raising kids, personal project, community work.
No its social status you can be a poorly paid academic/scientist and are middle class but say a train driver on 80k a year will consider themselves working class
Side note: that’s a relative bargain compared to Manhattan.
A 700 sq ft 1 bed/1 bath can easily be $3,000/mo in a desirable neighbourhood such as the East Village. A nicer doorman condo somewhere like Flatiron or the Upper West Side can be amywhere from $10k/mo to $30k/mo for 1000-1500 sq ft (or $3m to $5m for purchase).
And here I was thinking that SF or SV was expensive...
> $200-500k in the SF bay area is still considered middle class because housing prices have gotten so ridiculously high.
$200k-$500k of probably most often part of the classical capitalist-society middle class (petit bourgeoisie) in most of the country, though in some cases it will be high income proletariat (possibly proletarian intelligentsia), but at that level you are probably either driving a substantial share of your income from labor or forgoing income worth a substantial fraction of your current income by avoiding wage labor, so probably not the classical capitalist society upper class (pure capitalists / haut bourgeoisie.)
I live in suburbs outside Portland, OR. My wife and I together make about $150k/year. We both own cars less than 3 years old. We only own 1 house, but we take a 2-week vacation a 1-week vacation every year.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I consider myself the quintessential middle class.
My point was that kidsnow said $200-500k is middle class, but it really depends on location. It often feels that the majority of people on Hacker News are living in a Silicon Valley bubble. They talk as if $1,000,000 for a 1500 sq ft house is normal, as if $150k is decent entry-level wage, and...you get the idea.
$200-500k is middle class for Silicon Valley, but the higher end of that range is definitely upper class where I live.
Certainly, but they'll be working in trades of a couple thousand or tens of thousands.
If you have an investment account (That isn't a 401(k), 403(b), Roth IRA etc.) with hundreds of thousands that didn't happen from a single lucky investment (Like buying Apple or Amazon 10+ years ago), then you're probably more upper class.
Myself, outside my 401(k), I don't have any investments, mainly because I'm more concerned with eliminating my debts than taking on risks beyond my retirement account. But my wife and I make "only" $150k. If we made 300k, I might have some investments.
Again, though, we need to stop focusing on specific dollar amounts, since cost of living varies so wildly around the country. Get out of the SF Bay bubble.
