I had no idea that the bar for middle class was so low. Most of us here are nowhere near middle class status. Not that it matters, but before now I would've considered myself and most of us to be.
My experience is that most college-educated people don't really understand this, because they look at themselves and everyone they know and extrapolate their definition of "the middle class" from what that population makes, which skews their perspective considerably. So you get discussions about how people making $100,000/year or $250,000/year are "middle class," when statistically speaking they are very much not.
One useful economic definition of middle class is obtained by applying Frederick Strobel's distinction between those who are labor-dependent those who are capital-enhanced.
The middle class are the ones who fluctuate between the two categories: They have to keep working, but as long as they do, they have some surplus income. If they spend too much and go into debt, their surplus income goes away, and they have to work more.
This is useful because it explains how some can consider themselves to be "working class" or "middle class" and yet have income that is both above average and above median. They still have working class (or middle class) anxieties, mostly because of their local economy or their bad spending habits.
The important thing I try to always remember is that it's the 'middle' class, not the center class. Civilization can't survive with mostly middle management and mechanics - somebody has to actually do something at some point, rather than designing something, directing something, or fixing something. The middle class is a buffer between the bulk of people who work with their bodies, and the tiny number of people who try to maximize the ratio of those people's output vs. their compensation.
The middle class has never characterized America, it's just the class that writes all of the characterizations.
Outside of the handful of major metro areas you can get a respectable house for around 100k and a really nice one for perhaps 200-300k. Can you even buy a trailer home in the Valley for 100k?
Edit: I went and looked on Redfin and most trailer homes in the valley go for quite a bit over 100k there are maybe 4 listings for trailers for 100k or less.
It's not. This article is using the "American" definition of middle class, which most others refer to as "working class." Conflation between what we used to call middle class, and what we call middle class today is a huge source of confusion in pop economics.
Per capita income is per person. So if a family of four -- two adults and two children -- live in a neighborhood where the per capita income is $20k, then the expected income of that family is $80k. In other words, it counts children who don't even earn an income.
As such, median per capita income is always going to be considerably lower than, say, median HHI.
(Apologies if you already knew all this--I had to make a guess as to which figure from the article specifically you were referring to.)
