UK relating to a social group that consists of well-educated people , such as doctors , lawyers , and teachers , who have good jobs and are not poor , but are not very rich :. Middle-class children have more advantages. US relating to a social group that consists of ordinary people who usually have good jobs and are neither rich nor very poor :. Squash is a middle-class sport. They shop at a middle-class supermarket that sells dozens of different varieties of olives and fresh pasta.
Pushy middle-class parents are very good at getting their children into the best schools. We drove from middle-class suburbs to a very poor inner-city area. He has written a book about middle-class suburbia. They expressed worry about the district's current budget crisis and its vanishing middle-class work force. ECONOMICS the social group that consists of well-educated people , such as doctors , lawyers , and teachers , who are neither very rich nor very poor :. Tax subsidies will be granted to help uninsured middle-class families.
Compare lower-class. Examples of middle class. That decision places him squarely in the mainstream of scholars who have heretofore explored the middle - class experience. From the Cambridge English Corpus. Some of its adherents were middle - class , and others were working-class autodidacts.
The recordings included adults aged 40 years and over and adolescents, with equal numbers of middle - class and working-class speakers at each age. There has always been a divide between secure middle - class families and poorer working families and the government's policies are plainly intended to mitigate that divide.
But the ultimate failure of middle - class hegemony cannot be explained by isolated examples of disorderly conduct in the libraries. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Newsletters Donate My Account. Research Topics. Share this link:. Jesse Bennett is a former research analyst focusing on social and demographic trends research at Pew Research Center.
Richard Fry is a senior researcher focusing on economics and education at Pew Research Center. Rakesh Kochhar is a senior researcher at Pew Research Center.
Facts are more important than ever. Are you in the global middle class? Find out with our income calculator. The American middle class is stable in size, but losing ground financially to upper-income families. This is particularly true of the elderly living off their nest eggs. So some experts prefer to use wealth as the determining factor. New York University Professor Edward Wolff, for instance, defines middle class as the middle three-fifths of the wealth spectrum.
Those below that threshold are in debt and those above are wealthy. Another way to define middle class is by how much you spend. This more accurately reflects your well-being since income doesn't take into account non-cash government benefits, such as food stamps, or savings and can fluctuate greatly from year-to-year, say proponents of this measure.
Sullivan includes spending on food, transportation, entertainment, housing and other items. It excludes health care expenses and education, which Sullivan says might be considered investments. He defines the middle class as those in the middle fifth of spending. The shrinking middle class is less a decline in how well the population as a whole is doing. Also, there is more polarization of where growth is coming, at the extreme bottom and top of the economic spectrum.
So, it is not just that people are falling out of the middle class into the lower class—they are also rising into the upper class, albeit in smaller numbers. Also, note that the state of the U. On average, and according to reports by the U.
Census Bureau, the American population has grown older. This aging makes a big difference to the median income because retirees typically live off savings and generate little income. Also, the country is significantly more diverse than it was in the s. Increases in the number of immigrants, for example, push down median incomes because immigrants, on average, make less money.
According to Pew, the data suggests that the middle class has stabilized in size. See the chart from the report below, for these later figures on how the class composition has changed since the s. However, the data also suggests that middle-class families continue to lose financial ground to upper-income families. If we take a longer view—say, from to —we see that only the income of the upper class has recovered from the previous two economic recessions. Upper-class incomes were the only ones to rise over those 16 years.
This segmented rise has contributed to an ongoing trend since the s of the divergence of the upper class from the middle and lower classes. In another piece, Pew reported that the wealth gaps in between upper-income families and middle- and lower-income families were at the highest levels ever recorded.
As a growing body of research is demonstrating in ever greater detail, there is a substantial racial wealth gap in the United States. Note that Pew researchers, like the U. Census Bureau, use the term Hispanic, not Latinx. Black households did see progress, Pew reports. The percentage of lower-income White households stayed roughly the same, with increases at the top and a shrinking middle income group.
And Asian households experienced increases at both the top and the bottom of the income scale. You can see this as you look below at the Note from the report. So, the obvious follow-up question is: Where does that leave me? Into which class do I fall? Income data released by the U. Pew defines the middle class as those earning from two-thirds to double the median household income. Easy, right? Just take your household income and see where you fit, given these numbers. The lives of families making the median income look very different, given the vastly different cost-of-living levels across the U.
This lived experience can make it difficult to determine your income class status. People in the aggregate tend to live, work, and socialize with people of similar income levels. For this reason, we often do not have accurate reference points that would help us gauge our actual class status.
If you want to know exactly how you fit into the income class matrix, the Pew Research Center has a recently updated income calculator. You can break down your class status first by state, metropolitan area, income before taxes, and members of the household, then by education level, age, race, and marital status. State and city taxes vary, access to healthcare varies, city living is expensive, and so are children.
All of these factors can contribute to what class you feel you are in, regardless of what national statistics say. It turns out that lower class, middle class, and upper class are tricky terms to box in. The Pew income calculator is a good start for learning where your income puts you, given where you live and some background factors. However, the class you're in is about more than just how much money you make. Before we leave the topic, it is worth taking some time to think about how other considerations factor into who and where you are.
Start with social and cultural capital, a concept debuted in by French sociologist and public intellectual Pierre Bourdieu. He said that in addition to economic capital, there are social and cultural capital.
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