Middle class

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The middle class are any class in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class. In Marxist terms, middle class commonly refers to either the bourgeoisie before or during capitalism, or some emergent new class within capitalism. In common parlance, middle class refers to a set of culturally distinct contemporary Western cultures that emphasize consumerism and property ownership within capitalism. Middle class citizens traditionally hold conservative political views, often becoming (in the United States) registered conservative voters.

The common measures of what constitutes middle class vary significantly between cultures. In urban India, for example, a family is considered middle class if it resides in an owner-occupied property. In the United States, many families where the primary income-earner is employed in a blue collar job consider themselves middle class. In the United Kingdom their equivalents would likely be termed working class, because the level required to be middle class is commonly believed to be set much higher - and may include private schooling for children, ownership of a sizeable family house, luxuries such as family skiing holidays, and the main income-earner either holding a senior role in the professions or themselves being an owner/director of a corporation.

History and evolution of the term

The term "middle class" has a long history and has had several, sometimes contradictory, meanings. It was once defined by exception as an intermediate social class between the nobility and the peasantry of Europe. 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. Another definition equated the middle class to the original meaning of capitalist: someone with so much capital that they could rival nobles. By this definition, only millionaires and billionaires are middle class in modern times. In fact, to be a capital-owning millionaire was the essential criterion of the middle class in the industrial revolution. In France, the middle classes helped drive the French Revolution.^[1]

The modern sociological usage of the term "middle class," however, dates to the 1911 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. Included as belonging to the middle class are professionals, managers, and senior civil servants. The chief defining characteristic of membership middle class is possession of significant human capital.

Within capitalism, middle class initially referred to the bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie. However, with the immiserisation and proletarianisation of much of the petit bourgeois world, and the growth of finance capitalism, middle class came to refer to the combination of labour aristocracy, professionals and 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, though far from deterministically dependent. The following factors are often ascribed in modern usage to a "middle class":

• Achievement of tertiary education.
• Holding professional qualifications, including academics, lawyers, engineers, politicians and doctors regardless of their leisure or wealth.
• Belief in bourgeois values, such as high rates of house ownership and jobs which are perceived to be "secure".
• Lifestyle. In the United Kingdom, social status has historically been linked less directly to wealth than in the United States, and has also been judged by pointers such as accent, manners, place of education, occupation and the class of a person's family, circle of friends and acquaintances.
• Cultural identification. Often in the United States, the middle class are the most eager participants in pop culture whereas the reverse is true in Britain.^[2]

The second generation of new immigrants will often enthusiastically forsake their traditional folk culture as a sign of having arrived in the middle class.

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). In contrast, in the United Kingdom, in recent surveys up to two-thirds of Britons identify themselves as working class. The British Labour Party, which grew out of the organized 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 the working class.

Geographic terms

Geographic terms such as "Heartland America", "Middle America" and "Middle England" are used to refer to a concept of the middle class of a country being located in the centre of that country.

Middle America

Middle America suggests a small town or suburb in the United States where people are predominantly middle class. The economy of Middle America is traditionally considered agricultural, though most Middle Americans now live in suburban locales, and a person may hold Middle American values while not living geographically in the Midwestern United States, and vice versa.^[3][4] The phrase Middle American values refers to more traditional or conservative politics like family values. There are many people who object to the notion that one group or subgroup of Americans defines its values or defines proper family values.

Middle England

Though Middle England more commonly denotes the middle class of non-urban England, it also has connotations of "Deep England". The BBC described the Kentish town of Tunbridge Wells as the "spiritual home" of Middle England;^[5] correspondents on a rather insular outdated idea of England are often parodied by signing letters Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

Marxism

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. Marxist writers have used the term in two distinct but related ways.^[6] In the first sense it is used for the bourgeoisie, the urban merchant and professional class that stood between the aristocracy and the proletariat in the Marxist model. However, in modern developed countries, the bourgeoisie is taken to be the class that owns and controls the means of production, and is thus considered the ruling class in capitalist societies. As such, some Marxist writers specify the petite bourgeoisie – owners of small property who may not employ wage labor – as the "middle class" between the ruling and working classes.^[6] Marx himself regarded this version of the "middle class" as becoming merged with the working classes.^[6]

Recent growth of the global middle class

In February 2009, The Economist announced 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.^[7]

The Economist's article pointed out that in many emerging countries the middle class has not grown incrementally, but explosively. The rapid growth results from the fact that the majority of the people fall into the middle of a right-skewed bell-shaped curve, and when the peak of the population curve crosses the threshold into the middle class, the number of people in the middle class grows enormously. In addition, when the curve crosses the threshold, economic forces cause the bulge to become taller as incomes at that level grow faster than incomes in other ranges. The point at which the poor start entering the middle class by the millions is 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 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.

Professional-managerial class

Barbara Ehrenreich and her husband John defined a distinct part of the middle class in 1977 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"; and they named this group the "professional-managerial class".^[8] This group of middle class professionals are distinguished from the rest of the class by training and education (typically business qualifications and university degrees),^[9] with example occupations including academics and teachers, social workers, engineers, managers, nurses, and middle-level administrators.^[10] 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.^[11] The professional-managerial class seeks higher rank status and salary,^[12] and tend to have incomes above the average for their country.^[13]

Confusion surrounding the term

A persistent source of confusion surrounding the term "middle class" derives predominantly from there being no set criteria for such a definition. From an economic perspective, for example, members of the middle class do not necessarily fall in the middle of a society's income distribution. Instead, middle class salaries tend to be determined by middle class occupations, which in turn are attained by means of middle class values. Thus, individuals who might fall in the middle ground on a societal hierarchy as defined by sociologists do not necessarily fall into a middle ground on an economic hierarchy as defined by economists. As a result, intuitive colloquial and journalistic usage of the term casts a wide net and does not necessarily coincide with an academic sociological or economic definition.

See also

• Middle class squeeze
• Lower middle class
• Upper middle class
• American middle class
• Black middle class

Other:

• Bourgeoisie
• Classlessness
• Political donor class
• The Lonely Crowd
• Status paradox of migration
• Producerism
• Xiaozi
• Middle Class Millionaire
• Essex man
• Little Englander
• Worcester woman
• Deep England

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Brian W. Cashell: Who Are the “Middle Class”?, CRS Report for the Congress, March 20, 2007
• Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo (December 2007). What is middle class about the middle classes around the world? (PDF). Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics. pp. 50. http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/3107. 

External links

• Australia’s middle has moved
• Beazley reaches out to 'middle Australia'
• NOW on PBS: Middle Class Insecurity Are politicians listening to middle-class families on the edge of economic collapse?