Middle class

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The middle class first appeared in print in James Bradshaw's 1745 pamphlet, a document about Irish wool smuggling, of all things. That tiny footnote of an origin story hints at something essential: the middle class has always been defined by economic anxiety, by the gap between what people have and what they fear losing. Who exactly belongs to it has never been settled. Common definitions range from the middle fifth of a nation's income ladder all the way up to everyone except the poorest and wealthiest twenty percent. By one reading, that bracket is narrow. By another, it swallows nearly everyone. The questions worth chasing are these: where did the idea come from, why does it keep shifting, and what does it actually mean today when middle classes are growing explosively in Asia while the millennial generation is reportedly being pushed out of one in the Western world?

• 2. A Term That Kept Changing

  ›

  Friedrich Engels read the middle class as an intermediate layer squeezed between the nobility and the peasantry in late-feudal Europe. A new group he called the bourgeoisie, literally "town-dwellers", had risen around trade and commerce in the cities. In France, that group helped drive the French Revolution, eventually displacing the monarchists they had fought and becoming the ruling class in the new capitalist order. The word was doing a very different job depending on who used it. By 1913, T. H. C. Stevenson, a statistician working on the UK Registrar-General's report, gave the term its modern administrative shape: the middle class sat between the upper class and the working class and included professionals, managers, and senior civil servants. What held them together, in his reading, was control of significant human capital, even while remaining subordinate to an elite that controlled financial and legal capital. In the United States, the word took a further detour. Americans applied "middle class" to people who in most other countries would simply be called working class. By the end of the twentieth century, nearly everyone in the United States described themselves as middle class, with almost no one claiming the upper-class label.

• 3. Marxism and the Problem of Ownership

  ›

  Vladimir Lenin once wrote that the peasantry in Russia constituted eight- or nine-tenths of the petty bourgeoisie, which gives a sense of how broadly Marxist writers cast the net. Marxism grounds social class in a single hard question: who owns the means of production? The bourgeoisie owned them. The working class did not. The middle class, in this framework, sat in a genuinely unstable position. Louis C. Fraina, a pioneering American Marxist theoretician writing in the twentieth century, defined the middle class as "the class of independent small enterprisers, owners of productive property from which a livelihood is derived." He included propertied farmers but drew a careful line: propertyless tenant farmers were out. Salaried managers were in, but the masses of dependent salaried employees were not, though Fraina suspected that entire category might eventually qualify as a "new middle class" whose members were, in economic terms, a "new proletariat." The boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist economies meant the petite bourgeoisie moved back and forth between working-class and middle-class status as conditions shifted. That structural instability is one reason Marxist writers treated the middle class as a problem to be explained rather than a stable social fact to be accepted.

• 4. The Professional-Managerial Class

  ›

  In 1977, Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich named a new category: the professional-managerial class, defined as "salaried mental 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." Their list of example occupations ran from academics and teachers to social workers, engineers, accountants, managers, nurses, and middle-level administrators. The Ehrenreichs built their definition on earlier work by Andre Gorz and Serge Mallet, who had studied a "new working class" that considered itself middle class but, lacking ownership of any means of production, was technically working class. What distinguished the professional-managerial class in practice was training and credentials, typically business qualifications and university degrees, and a tendency toward incomes above the national average. A broad middle class of this kind, the source notes, can act as a counterweight against oligarchy, a claim that would be tested differently depending on where you looked.

• 5. The Global Surge

  ›

  In February 2009, The Economist declared that over half the world's population now belonged to the middle class, largely because of rapid growth in emerging countries. The magazine's definition was anchored to discretionary income: the middle class begins where people have roughly a third of their income left for spending after covering basic food and shelter. By that measure, the number of middle-class people in Asia surpassed the number in the West sometime around 2007 or 2008. In China, the shift had been especially fast. Between 1990 and 2005, the Chinese middle class grew from fifteen percent to sixty-two percent of the population. A 2013 figure from the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the number of middle-class Chinese at around 420 million people, or thirty-one percent of the country. The key mechanism, according to The Economist, was the moment when poor countries reach peak benefit from cheap labor through international trade, just before wages rise enough to price them out of global markets for cheap goods. That stage coincided with rapid urbanization, as subsistence farmers left marginal land to work in factories, producing a several-fold increase in economic output before wages caught up. In 2010, an OECD working paper estimated 1.8 billion people were members of the global middle class. Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Report of 2014 put the number at one billion adults, with wealth between ten thousand and one hundred thousand dollars.

• 6. Regional Contrasts

  ›

  Africa presents one of the starkest gaps in the global picture. A study by the German Development Institute tracked Sub-Saharan Africa's middle class growing from 14 million to 31 million people between 1990 and 2010, a more than doubling in absolute numbers. Yet a separate analysis by EIU Canback found that ninety percent of Africans still fell below an income of ten dollars a day, and the proportion earning between ten and twenty dollars a day rose only from 4.4% to 6.2% between 2004 and 2014. A 2014 study by Standard Bank economist Simon Freemantle counted 15.3 million middle-class households across eleven surveyed African nations. In South Africa specifically, a 2015 Institute for Race Relations report estimated that between ten and twenty percent of the population qualified as middle class. Latin America showed a different trajectory: a World Bank study found the number of middle-class Latin Americans rose from 103 million to 152 million between 2003 and 2009. In India, the range of estimates has always been wide. A 1983 article placed the Indian middle class somewhere between 70 and 100 million. By 2017, The Economist put the figure at 78 million using a threshold of more than ten dollars per day, but if the threshold dropped to two dollars per day, 604 million people qualified, a number researchers called the "new middle class." Russia's pattern diverged further still: research from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2015 estimated that about fifteen percent of Russians were "firmly middle class" and around another twenty-five percent sat on the periphery.

• 7. The Measurement Problem

  ›

  Economist Thomas Piketty, in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, took direct aim at the Gini coefficient, one of the most widely used tools for comparing wealth across countries. He described it as a "synthetic index" that mixes "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." The problem runs deeper than any single index. The OECD defines middle-class households as those with income between seventy-five percent and two hundred percent of the median national income. The Pew Research Center counted a combined sixteen percent of the world's population as upper-middle income and upper income in 2011. The Paradox of Interest framework uses decile groups and wealth distribution data to calculate middle-class size and wealth share. Each method produces a different number, sometimes for the same country in the same year. An April 2019 OECD report added a sharper political dimension: the millennial generation is being pushed out of the middle class across the Western world. In Germany, sociologist Andreas Reckwitz described two distinct middle classes in 2017: a new middle class of highly qualified academics clustered in large cities with careers in the knowledge economy, and an old middle class of people with medium levels of education in small-town and rural areas, tending toward conservative and traditional attitudes. The gap between those two groups within a single country may be as consequential as any gap between nations.