Middle class

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]

History and evolution of the term

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 in Marxist terms as an intermediate social class between the nobility and the peasantry of Europe in late-feudalist society.[7] 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. 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 endless boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist economies results 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 as they are whipsawed by the vicissitudes of the capitalist system. Vulgar 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 exploitation 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":

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]

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 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 theoretician Louis 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]

Social reproduction

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]

Professional-managerial class

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]

Compare the term "managerial caste".[30]

Recent global growth

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 rapid growth results primarily from their new, vastly broader definition of "middle class". 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.

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]

Russia

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]

China

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]

India

According to NCAER, India's middle class population was 267 million in 2016. Further ahead, by 2025-26 the number of middle class households in India is likely to more than double to 113.8 million households or 547 million individuals.[43] Another estimate put the Indian middle class as numbering 475 million people by 2030.[44]

Africa

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]

Latin America

According to a study by the World Bank, the number of Latin Americans who are middle class rose from 103m to 152m between 2003 and 2009.[51]

Middle-class shares by income and wealth

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). 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: Credit Suisse[53]
Rank
No.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
Country/TerritoryMiddle class
(%)
Upper class*1
(%)
Lower class*2
(%)
 Australia66.114.219.7
 Singapore62.316.021.7
 Belgium62.112.325.6
 Italy59.78.631.7
 Japan59.59.131.4
 Taiwan59.415.225.4
 United Kingdom57.412.230.4
 Norway56.412.231.4
 United Arab Emirates56.47.835.8
 Spain55.83.840.4
 Netherlands54.17.438.5
 Ireland50.37.442.3
 New Zealand50.321.927.8
 France49.212.538.3
 Canada47.810.541.7
 Greece47.22.850.0
 Finland45.64.450.0
 Portugal44.62.752.7
 Korea44.62.952.5
  Switzerland44.514.041.5
 Hong Kong44.45.150.5
 Austria44.07.948.1
 Israel42.53.753.8
 Germany42.47.650.0
 Denmark39.510.550.0
 Sweden39.411.549.1
 United States37.712.350.0
 Saudi Arabia33.12.164.8
 Czech Republic26.51.671.9
 Chile22.31.576.2
 Poland19.31.079.7
 Mexico17.11.081.9
 Malaysia16.71.282.1
 Colombia15.30.983.8
 South Africa13.71.185.2
 China10.70.688.7
 Peru10.30.888.9
 Turkey9.90.889.3
 Brazil8.10.691.3
 Egypt5.00.494.6
 Philippines4.80.494.8
 Indonesia4.40.695.0
 Russia4.10.595.4
 Argentina4.00.395.7
 Thailand3.70.396.0

^ *1: (Middle class and above) - (Middle class)

^ *2: 100 - (Middle class and above)

See also

Other:

References

  1. http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/what-is-middle-class-anyway/index.html
  2. Gilbert, Dennis (1998). The American Class Structure. New York: Wadsworth Publishing. 0-534-50520-1.
  3. "Home : Oxford English Dictionary". oed.com.
  4. James Bradshaw (1745). scheme to prevent the running of Irish wools to France: and Irish woollen goods to foreign countries. By prohibiting the importation of Spanish wools into Ireland, ... Humbly offered to the consideration of Parliament. By a Merchant of London. printed for J. Smith, and G. Faulkner. pp. 4–5. Retrieved 18 May 2012.
  5. Hunt, Margaret R. (1996). The Middling Sort Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780. University California Press. |access-date= requires |url= (help)
  6. "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."
  7. Engels, Friedrich (1892). 1892 Introduction to "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific". Marxists Internet Archive: Marxists Internet Archive.
  8. Georges Lefebvre, La Révolution Française, 1951 1957
  9. Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich (1848). Manifesto of the Communist Party. Marxists Internet Archive: Marxists Internet Archive.
  10. "Who is the Middle Class?". PBS. 25 June 2004. Retrieved 19 April 2011.
  11. "Survey on Class". Ipsos MORI. 19 March 2008. Retrieved 18 April 2011.
  12. "Perceptions of Social Class (trends)". Ipsos MORI. 19 March 2008. Retrieved 18 April 2011.
  13. "Room for Debate: Who Should Be the Judge of Middle Class?". The New York Times. 23 December 2010.
  14. "Why is 'chav' still controversial?". 3 June 2011 via www.bbc.co.uk.
  15. Communist League Britain, Marxism and Class: Some definitions. undated. http://www.mltranslations.org/Britain/Marxclass.htm at §The 'Middle Class'
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 1 2 3 Lewis Corey, "American Class Relations", Marxist Quarterly, vol. 1 no. 2 (January–March 1937), p. 141.
  19. Doob, Christopher B. (2013). "The Badly Besieged Middle Class". Social Inequality and Social Stratification in US Society. New Jersey: Pearson. pp. 157–167.
  20. 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.
  21. Doob, Christopher B. (2013). "The Badly Besieged Middle Class". Social Inequality and Social Stratification in US Society. New Jersey: Pearson. pp. 157–67.
  22. 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.
  23. Madland, David; Nick Bunker. "The Middle Class is the Key to a Better Educated Nation". Center for American Progress Action Fund. Retrieved 11 August 2012.
  24. Stewart Clegg, Paul Boreham, Geoff Dow; Class, politics, and the economy. Routledge. 1986. ISBN 978-0-7102-0452-3. Retrieved 4 October 2009.
  25. Philip Green, Retrieving democracy: in search of civic equality Rowman & Littlefield. books.google.com. 1985. ISBN 0-8476-7405-3. Retrieved 4 October 2009.
  26. Hidden Technocrats: The New Class and New Capitalism. Transaction Publishers. 1991. ISBN 1-56000-787-7. Retrieved 4 October 2009.
  27. Between labor and capital - Google Books. books.google.com. 1979. ISBN 978-0-89608-037-9. Retrieved 4 October 2009.
  28. The general theory of ... - Google Books. books.google.com. 1998. ISBN 978-0-521-59006-8. Retrieved 4 October 2009.
  29. Gail Paradise Kelly, Sheila Slaughter; Women's higher education in comparative perspective. Springer. 1990. ISBN 0-7923-0800-X. Retrieved 4 October 2009.
  30. Kay, Geoffrey (1975). Development and underdevelopment: a Marxist analysis. Macmillan. p. 194. ISBN 0-333-15402-9. Retrieved 1 January 2011. [...] the new managerial caste [...] as a force in capitalist society [...]
  31. Piketty, Thomas (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 243. ISBN 978-0-674-43000-6.
  32. Parker, John (12 February 2009). "Special report: Burgeoning bourgeoisie". The Economist (published 13 February 2009). Retrieved 13 December 2009.
  33. "It is doubtful, whether "middle classes" in developing countries are driving progress". D+C.
  34. Gilbert, D. (2002) The American Class Structure: In An Age of Growing Inequality. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth; Thompson, W. & Hickey, J. (2005).
  35. Society in Focus. Boston, MA: Pearson, Allyn & Bacon; Beeghley, L. (2004).
  36. The Structure of Social Stratification in the United States. Boston, MA: Pearson, Allyn & Bacon.
  37. "Page not found". oecd.org.
  38. "China's "middle class" 10 times larger than that in India". The Times of India.
  39. "World Population by Income". Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project. 8 July 2015.
  40. "Rosgosstrakh Strategic Research Centre" (PDF).
  41. "Russian middle class slowly stirred to action by economic crisis". Yahoo News UK. 10 April 2015.
  42. "China's middle class growing fast". BBC News.
  43. "India's middle class population to touch 267 million in 5 yrs".
  44. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 7 January 2016.
  45. "Making sense of Africa's middle class". howwemadeitinafrica.com.
  46. "How South Africa's middle class makes use of technology - htxt.africa". htxt.africa.
  47. "Black middle class has expanded quickly but may now slow – new IRR report". irr.org.za.
  48. "SA middle class getting poorer".
  49. "Few and far between". The Economist. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 31 October 2015.
  50. https://www.die-gdi.de/uploads/media/DP_35.2014.pdf
  51. "Latin America's middle class". The Economist.
  52. 1 2 "Through an American lens, Western Europe's middle classes appear smaller". 5 June 2017.
  53. 1 2 Global Wealth Report 2015. October 2015. p. 32.
  54. https://www.oecd.org/std/household-wealth-inequality-across-OECD-countries-OECDSB21.pdf

Further reading

  • Balzer, Harley D., ed. Russia's Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (ME Sharpe, 1996).
  • Banerjee, Abhijit V. and Esther Duflo (December 2007). What is middle class about the middle classes around the world? (PDF). Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics. p. 50. Archived from the original on 2009-05-25. Retrieved 2009-05-09.
  • 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).
  • Cashell, Brian W. Who Are the "Middle Class"?, CRS Report for the Congress, 20 March 2007
  • Fry, Richard; Kochhar, Rakesh (11 May 2016). "Are you in the American middle class? Find out with our income calculator". Pew Research Center. Retrieved 18 February 2018.
  • 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+.


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