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The middle class is a class of people in the middle of a social hierarchy. The very definition of the term "middle class" is highly political and vigorously contested by various schools of political and economic philosophy. Modern social theorists - and especially economists (with widely divergent open and hidden political motivations behind their arguments) - have defined and re-defined the term "middle class" in order to serve their particular political ends. The definitions of the term "middle class" therefore are the result of the more- or less-scientific methods used when delineating the parameters of what is and isn't "middle class".
In Weberian socioeconomic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class. The common measures of what constitutes middle class vary significantly among cultures. One of the narrowest definitions limits it to those in the middle fifth of the nation's income ladder. A wider characterization includes everyone but the poorest 20% and the wealthiest 20%.[1]
In modern American vernacular usage, the term "middle class" is most often used as a self-description by those persons whom academics and Marxists would otherwise identify as the working class which are below both the upper class and the true middle class, but above those in poverty. This leads to considerable ambiguity over the meaning of the term "middle class" in American usage. Sociologists such as Dennis Gilbert and Joseph Kahl see this American self-described "middle class" (i.e. working class) as the most populous class in the United States.[2]
The term "middle class" is first attested in James Bradshaw's 1745 pamphlet Scheme to prevent running Irish Wools to France.[3][4] Another phrase used in Early modern Europe was "the middling sort".[5][6]
The term "middle class" has had several, sometimes contradictory, meanings. Friedrich Engels saw the category as an intermediate social class between the nobility and the peasantry of Europe in late-feudalist society.[7][need quotation to verify] While the nobility owned the countryside, and the peasantry worked the countryside, a new bourgeoisie (literally "town-dwellers") arose around mercantile functions in the city. In France, the middle classes helped drive the French Revolution.[8] This "middle class" eventually overthrew the ruling monarchists of feudal society, thus becoming the new ruling class or bourgeoisie in the new capitalist-dominated societies.[9]
The modern usage of the term "middle-class", however, dates to the 1913 UK Registrar-General's report, in which the statistician T.H.C. Stevenson identified the middle class as that falling between the upper-class and the working-class.[citation needed] Included as belonging to the middle-class are: professionals, managers, and senior civil servants. The chief defining characteristic of membership in the middle-class is possession of significant human capital.
Within capitalism, "middle-class" initially referred to the bourgeoisie; later, with the further differentiation of classes in the course of development of capitalist societies, the term came to be synonymous with the term petite bourgeoisie. The boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist economies result in the periodical and more or less temporary impoverisation and proletarianisation of much of the petit bourgeois world resulting in their moving back and forth between working-class and petit-bourgeois status. The typical modern definitions of "middle class" tend to ignore the fact that the classical petit-bourgeoisie is and has always been the owner of a small-to medium-sized business whose income is derived almost exclusively from the employment of workers; "middle class" came to refer to the combination of the labour aristocracy, the professionals, and the salaried white collar workers.
The size of the middle class depends on how it is defined, whether by education, wealth, environment of upbringing, social network, manners or values, etc. These are all related, but are far from deterministically dependent. The following factors are often ascribed in modern usage to a "middle class":[by whom?]
In the United States by the end of the twentieth century, more people identified themselves as middle-class than as lower or "working" class (with insignificant numbers identifying themselves as upper-class).[13] The Labour Party in the UK, which grew out of the organised labour movement and originally drew almost all of its support from the working-class, reinvented itself under Tony Blair in the 1990s as "New Labour", a party competing with the Conservative Party for the votes of the middle-class as well as those of the Labour Party's traditional group of voters - the working-class. By 2011 almost three-quarters of British people were found to identify themselves as middle-class.[14]
In Marxism, which defines social classes according to their relationship with the means of production, the "middle class" is said to be the class below the ruling class and above the proletariat in the Marxist social schema and is synonymous with the term "petit-" or "petty-bourgeoisie". Marxist writers have used the term in two distinct but related ways.[15] In the first sense it is used for the bourgeoisie, the urban merchant and professional class that arose between the aristocracy and the proletariat in the waning years of feudalism in the Marxist model. V. I. Lenin, stated that the "peasantry ... in Russia constitute eight- or nine-tenths of the petty bourgeoisie".[16][17] However, in modern developed countries, Marxist writers define the petite bourgeoisie as primarily comprising, as the name implies, owners of small to medium-sized businesses who derive their income from the exploitation of wage-laborers (and who are in turn exploited by the "big" bourgeoisie i.e. bankers, owners of large corporate trusts, etc.) as well as the highly educated professional class of doctors, engineers, architects, lawyers, university professors, salaried middle-management of capitalist enterprises of all sizes, etc. – as the "middle class" which stands between the ruling capitalist "owners of the means of production" and the working class (whose income is derived solely from hourly wages).
Pioneer 20th century American Marxist theoreticianLouis C. Fraina (Lewis Corey) defined the middle class as "the class of independent small enterprisers, owners of productive property from which a livelihood is derived."[18] Included in this social category, from Fraina's perspective, were "propertied farmers" but not propertyless tenant farmers. Middle class also included salaried managerial and supervisory employees but not "the masses of propertyless, dependent salaried employees.[18] Fraina speculated that the entire category of salaried employees might be adequately described as a "new middle class" in economic terms, although this remained a social grouping in which "most of whose members are a new proletariat".[18]
According to Christopher B. Doob, a sociology writer, the middle-class grooms each future generation to take over from the previous one. He states that, to do this the middle class have almost developed a system for turning children of the middle-class into successful citizens. Allegedly those who are categorized under the American middle-class give education great importance, and value success in education as one of the chief factors in establishing the middle-class life. Supposedly the parents place a strong emphasis on the significance of quality education and its effects on success later in life. He believes that the best way to understand education through the eyes of middle-class citizens would be through social reproduction as middle-class parents breed their own offspring to become successful members of the middle-class. Members of the middle-class consciously use their available sources of capital to prepare their children for the adult world.[19]
The middle-class childhood is often characterized by an authoritative parenting approach with a combination of parental warmth, support and control. Parents set some rules establishing limits, but overall this approach creates a greater sense of trust, security, and self-confidence.[20]
In addition to an often authoritative parenting style, middle-class parents provide their children with valuable sources of capital.[21]
Parents of middle-class children make use of their social capital when it comes to their children's education as they seek out other parents and teachers for advice. Some parents even develop regular communication with their child's teachers, asking for regular reports on behavior and grades. When problems do occur, middle-class parents are quick to "enlist the help of professionals when they feel their children need such services".[22] The middle-class parents' involvement in their children's schooling underlines their recognition of its importance.[23]
In 1977 Barbara Ehrenreich and her then husband John defined a new class in United States as "salaried menial workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor ... [is] ... the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations"; the Ehrenreichs named this group the "professional-managerial class".[24]
This group of middle-class professionals are distinguished from other social classes by their training and education (typically business qualifications and university degrees),[25] with example occupations including academics and teachers, social workers, engineers, managers, nurses, and middle-level administrators.[26] The Ehrenreichs developed their definition from studies by André Gorz, Serge Mallet, and others, of a "new working class", which, despite education and a perception of themselves as being middle class, were part of the working class because they did not own the means of production, and were wage earners paid to produce a piece of capital.[27] The professional-managerial class seeks higher rank status and salary,[28] and tend to have incomes above the average for their country.[29]
It is important to understand that modern definitions of the term "middle class" are often politically motivated and vary according to the exigencies of political purpose which they were conceived to serve in the first place as well as due to the multiplicity of more- or less-scientific methods used to measure and compare "wealth" between modern advanced industrial states (where poverty is relatively low and the distribution of wealth more egalitarian in a relative sense) and in developing countries (where poverty and a profoundly unequal distribution of wealth crush the vast majority of the population). Many of these methods of comparison have been harshly criticised; for example, economist Thomas Piketty, in his book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", describes one of the most commonly used comparative measures of wealth across the globe – the Gini coefficient – as being an example of "synthetic indices ... which mix very different things, such as inequality with respect to labor and capital, so that it is impossible to distinguish clearly among the multiple dimensions of inequality and the various mechanisms at work."[31]
In February 2009, The Economist asserted that over half the world's population now belongs to the middle class, as a result of rapid growth in emerging countries. It characterized the middle class as having a reasonable amount of discretionary income, so that they do not live from hand to mouth as the poor do, and defined it as beginning at the point where people have roughly a third of their income left for discretionary spending after paying for basic food and shelter. This allows people to buy consumer goods, improve their health care, and provide for their children's education. Most of the emerging middle class consists of people who are middle-class by the standards of the developing world but not the rich one, since their money incomes do not match developed country levels, but the percentage of it which is discretionary does. By this definition, the number of middle-class people in Asia exceeded that in the West sometime around 2007 or 2008.[32]
The Economist's article pointed out that in many emerging countries the middle class has not grown incrementally, but explosively. The point at which the poor start entering the middle class by the millions is alleged to be the time when poor countries get the maximum benefit from cheap labour through international trade, before they price themselves out of world markets for cheap goods. It is also a period of rapid urbanization, when subsistence farmers abandon marginal farms to work in factories, resulting in a several-fold increase in their economic productivity before their wages catch up to international levels. That stage was reached in China some time between 1990 and 2005, when the Chinese "middle class" grew from 15% to 62% of the population, and is just being reached in India now.
The Economist predicted that surge across the poverty line should continue for a couple of decades and the global middle class will grow enormously between now and 2030.
Based on the rapid growth, scholars expect the global middle class to be the driving force for sustainable development. This assumption, however, is contested.[33]
As the American middle class is estimated by some researchers to comprise approximately 45% of the population,[34][35][36]The Economist's article would put the size of the American middle class below the world average. This difference is due to the extreme difference in definitions between The Economist's and many other models.[discuss]
In 2010, a working paper by the OECD asserted that 1.8 billion people were now members of the global "middle class".[37] Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Report 2014, released in October 2014, estimated that one billion adults belonged to the "middle class", with wealth anywhere between the range of $10,000–$100,000.[38]
According to a study carried out by the Pew Research Center, a combined 16% of the world's population in 2011 were "upper-middle income" and "upper income".[39]
In 2012, the "middle class" in Russia was estimated as 15% of the whole population. Due to sustainable growth, the pre-crisis level was exceeded.[40] In 2015, research from the Russian Academy of Sciences estimated that around 15% of the Russian population are "firmly middle class", while around another 25% are "on the periphery".[41]
A study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) estimated that 19% of Chinese were middle class in 2003, including any household with assets worth between $18,000 and $36,000.[42]
According to a 2011 report by National Council for Applied Economic Research of India, India's middle class population is expected to increase from 160 million to 267 million in 2016, 20.3% of the country's total population. Further ahead, by 2025-26 the number of middle class households in India is likely to more than double to 547 million individuals.[43] Another estimate put the Indian middle class as numbering 475 million people by 2030.[44]
According to a 2014 study by Standard Bank economist Simon Freemantle, a total of 15.3 million households in 11 surveyed African nations are middle-class. These include Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.[45] In South Africa, a report conducted by the Institute for Race Relations in 2015[46] estimated that between 10%-20% of South Africans are middle class, based on various criteria.[47] An earlier study estimated that in 2008 21.3% of South Africans were members of the middle class.[48]
A study by EIU Canback indicates 90% of Africans fall below an income of $10 a day. The proportion of Africans in the $10–$20 middle class (excluding South Africa), rose from 4.4% to only 6.2% between 2004 and 2014. Over the same period, the proportion of "upper middle" income ($20–$50 a day) went from 1.4% to 2.3%.[49]
According to a 2014 study by the German Development Institute, the middle class of Sub-Saharan Africa rose from 14 million to 31 million people between 1990 and 2010.[50]
The American middle class is smaller than middle classes across Western Europe, but its income is higher, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis of the U.S. and 11 European nations.[52]
The median disposable (after-tax) income of middle-class households in the U.S. was $60,884 in 2010. With the exception of Luxembourg – a virtual city-state where the median income was $71,799 – the disposable incomes of middle-class households in the other 10 Western European countries in the study trailed well behind the American middle class.[52]
The numbers below reflect the middle, upper, and lower share of all adults by country by net wealth (not income). Middle class is defined here for the US as those adults with a net wealth of between USD 50,000 and USD 500,000 in mid 2015. Purchasing power parity is used to adjust these number for other countries.[53] Unlike that of the upper class, wealth of the middle and lowest quintile consists substantially of non-financial assets, specifically home equity. Factors which explain differences in home equity include housing prices and home ownership rates. According to the OECD, the vast majority of financial assets in every country analysed is found in the top of the wealth distribution.[53][54]
Source: Global Wealth Report 2015, Credit Suisse[53]
^Hunt, Margaret R. (1996). The Middling Sort Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780. University California Press.
^"To be one of "the middling sort" in urban England in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century was to live a life tied, one way or another, to the world of commerce."
^Lenin, V. I. (25 February 1907). "The Bolsheviks and the Petty Bourgeoisie". Marxists Internet Archive. Novy Luch. Retrieved 8 June 2018. In particular, the, peasantry, who in Russia constitute eight- or nine-tenths of the petty bourgeoisie, are struggling primarily for land.
^Lenin, V.I. (October 9–10, 1917). "The Tasks of the Revolution". Marxists Internet Archive. Rabochy Put. Retrieved 8 June 2018. Russia is a country of the petty bourgeoisie, by far the greater part of the population belonging to this class.CS1 maint: Date format (link)
^ abcLewis Corey, "American Class Relations", Marxist Quarterly, vol. 1 no. 2 (January–March 1937), p. 141.
^Doob, Christopher B. (2013). "The Badly Besieged Middle Class". Social Inequality and Social Stratification in US Society. New Jersey: Pearson. pp. 157–167.
^Demo, David H.; Martha J. Cox (2000). "Families with Young Children: A Review off Research in the 1990s". Journal of Marriage and the Family. 62 (November): 876–95. doi:10.1111/j.1741-3737.2000.00876.x.
^Doob, Christopher B. (2013). "The Badly Besieged Middle Class". Social Inequality and Social Stratification in US Society. New Jersey: Pearson. pp. 157–67.
^Lareau, Annette (2002). "Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in Black Families and White Families". American Sociological Review. 67 (October): 747–76. doi:10.2307/3088916. JSTOR3088916.
Blackbourn, David, and Richard J. Evans, eds. The German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century (1991).
Jones, Larry Eugene. "'The Dying Middle': Weimar Germany and the Fragmentation of Bourgeois Politics." Central European History 5.1 (1972): 23-54.
Kocka, Jürgen. "The Middle Classes in Europe," Journal of Modern History 67#4 (1995): 783-806. doi.org/10.1086/245228. online
Kocka, Jürgen, and J. Allan Mitchell, eds. Bourgeois Society in 19th Century Europe (1992)
Lebovics, Herman. Social Conservatism and the Middle Class in Germany, 1914-1933 (Princeton UP, 2015).
López, A. Ricardo, and Barbara Weinstein, eds. The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History (Duke University Press, 2012) 446 pp. scholarly essays
McKibbin, Ross. Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951 (2000) pp 44-105.
Mills, C. Wright, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951).
Pilbeam, Pamela. The Middle Classes in Europe, 1789-1914: France, Germany, Italy, and Russia (1990)
Wells, Jonathan Daniel. "The Southern Middle Class," Journal of Southern History, Volume: 75#3 2009. pp 651+.
A social class is a set of subjectively defined concepts in the social sciences and political theory centered on models of social stratification in which people are grouped into a set of hierarchical social categories, the most common being the upper, middle and lower classes.
Bourgeoisie
The bourgeoisie is a polysemous French term that can mean:
a sociologically defined class, especially in contemporary times, referring to people with a certain cultural and financial capital belonging to the middle or upper middle class: the upper (haute), middle (moyenne), and petty (petite) bourgeoisie ; an affluent and often opulent stratum of the middle class who stand opposite the proletariat class.
originally and generally, "those who live in the borough", that is to say, the people of the city, as opposed to those of rural areas; in this sense, the bourgeoisie began to grow in Europe from the 11th century and particularly during the Renaissance of the 12th century, with the first developments of rural exodus and urbanization.
a legally defined class of the Middle Ages to the end of the Ancien Régime in France, that of inhabitants having the rights of citizenship and political rights in a city.
Social class in the United States
Social class in the United States is a controversial issue, having many competing definitions, models, and even disagreements over its very existence. Many Americans believe that in the country there are just three classes: the American rich; the American middle class; the American poor. More complex models that have been proposed describe as many as a dozen class levels; while still others deny the very existence, in the European sense, of social class in American society. Most definitions of class structure group people according to wealth, income, education, type of occupation, and membership in a specific subculture or social network. Most of the social classes entirely ignore the existence of parallel Black, Hispanic and minorities societies.
Economic inequality
Economic inequality covers a wide variety of topics. It can refer to either income distribution or the distribution of wealth,.
Social stratification
Social stratification is a kind of social differentiation whereby a society groups people into socioeconomic strata, based upon their occupation and income, wealth and social status, or derived power. As such, stratification is the relative social position of persons within a social group, category, geographic region, or social unit.
Income inequality in the United States
Income inequality in the United States is the extent to which income is distributed in an uneven manner among the American population. The inequality has increased significantly since the 1970s after several decades of stability, meaning the share of the nation's income received by higher income households has increased. This trend is evident with income measured both before taxes as well as after taxes and transfer payments, but diminishes to a significant extent if in-kind compensation is considered, such as employer-paid healthcare premiums, which have increased dramatically over the same time period. Income inequality has fluctuated considerably since measurements began around 1915, moving in an arc between peaks in the 1920s and 2000s, with a 30-year period of relatively lower inequality between 1950–1980. Recasting the 2012 income using the 1979 income distribution, the bottom 99% of families would have averaged about $7,100 more income.
Social inequality
Social inequality occurs when resources in a given society are distributed unevenly, typically through norms of allocation, that engender specific patterns along lines of socially defined categories of persons. It is the differentiation preference of access of social goods in the society brought about by power, religion, kinship, prestige, race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, and class. The social rights include labor market, the source of income, health care, and freedom of speech, education, political representation, and participation. Social inequality linked to economic inequality, usually described on the basis of the unequal distribution of income or wealth, is a frequently studied type of social inequality. Though the disciplines of economics and sociology generally use different theoretical approaches to examine and explain economic inequality, both fields are actively involved in researching this inequality. However, social and natural resources other than purely economic resources are also unevenly distributed in most societies and may contribute to social status. Norms of allocation can also affect the distribution of rights and privileges, social power, access to public goods such as education or the judicial system, adequate housing, transportation, credit and financial services such as banking and other social goods and services.
Wealth inequality in the United States
Wealth inequality in the United States is the unequal distribution of assets among residents of the United States. Wealth includes the values of homes, automobiles, personal valuables, businesses, savings, and investments. The net worth of U.S. households and non-profit organizations was $94.7 trillion in the first quarter of 2017, a record level both in nominal terms and purchasing power parity. If divided equally among 124 million U.S. households, this would be $760,000 per family; however, the bottom 50% of families, representing 62 million American households, average $11,000 net worth. From an international perspective, the difference in US median and mean wealth per adult is over 600%.
Working class
The working class comprises those engaged in waged or salaried labour, especially in manual-labour occupations and industrial work. Working-class occupations include blue-collar jobs, some white-collar jobs, and most pink-collar jobs. Members of the working class rely for their income exclusively upon their earnings from wage labour; thus the category includes almost all of the working population of industrialized economies, as well as those employed in the urban areas of non-industrialized economies or in the rural workforce.
