What Is “Middle Class”?

In an article at the Atlantic anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom struggles to define what is meant by “middle class”:

The question of how to define the middle class is one of the perennial mysteries of American social life. Most people say they’re “middle class,” so how can we know what this really means? Every few years some intrepid social scientists venture a new definition.

This September, the Brookings Institution economists Richard Reeves and Katherine Guyot argued that the middle class is “the middle 60 percent of households on the income distribution,” which represents $37,000 to $147,000 for a three-person household. Full stop. Downplaying the importance of education, they wrote that income is the most useful measure of class because it captures all of the other conditions that make a person middling, including consumption, education, and relative social standing; it is not only how much money individuals take home.

That actually makes a certain amount of sense. Were incomes distributed in a statistically normal distribution two-thirds of the people would be in the middle—between one standard deviation below and one standard deviation above median income.

Dr. Zaloom examines and rejects income as a metric for middle class-ness, finally latching onto a certain level of security as an indicator for being middle class. That, too, makes a certain amount of sense.

Some of her other suggestions, e.g. valuing education, possessing the amenities of a middle class lifestyle, etc., I think are flatly wrong. Those are strategies for achieving the security of the middle class rather than metrics for it. Indeed, I might argue that seeking the amenities of a middle class lifestyle without adopting the behaviors and habits of mind that are the hallmarks of the middle class in the United States are a key factor in undermining the middle class.

My favorite definition of “middle class” is that it has less to do with your income than with your sources of income. The lower class is paid by the hour; the middle class receives a salary; the upper class’s primary sources of income are rents, royalties, and dividends.

I think I’m distinctively qualified to comment on class by virtue of my family background and upbringing. My father’s family was bourgeois in the extreme. The traditional family occupation for the Schulers was milk broker. In Switzerland you can hardly get more bourgeois than that. My mother’s family on the other hand was not lower class, middle class, or upper class. Artists and performers are not members of a class, something that can be measured by their relationship with security: zero. They are outcaste.

I spent the first part of my childhood among the lower middle class, the “working class”, and its second part among the upper middle class and petty aristocracy. That gives me a certain level of perspective.

You won’t read it in the history books but, just as the secret of American military success does not reside in its generals but in its non-coms, the secret of American cultural success is in its middle class. To be middle class is to accept the behaviors and habits of mind of the American middle class.

Over the period of the last sixty or so years, a significant portion of the American population has been trying to erode the middle class, rejecting its behaviors and values, while still pursuing the appurtenances of a middle class lifestyle. They are phonies in the same sense that Jack Kerouac was a phony. He may have gone on the road but he always returned to mama.

In the end I think I arrive at a similar destination as Dr. Zaloom albeit from a different direction. It’s very difficult to speak of the “middle class” in the U. S. any more. I think that’s a very sad and ultimately self-destructive error.