Is the middle class going away?

[kramerfan86]

Middle class won't die out, you inherit your class from your parents. You can be broke as hell but you're still middle class, you can put a pitmans hat on a drooling but he's still upper class.

This really couldnt be more wrong. Plenty of people shift class, whether it be up or down.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Does that imply that I'm a peasant, because most of my great-great-great-grandparents were peasants? (I mean, I'm mostly Irish and Highlander, so that isn't even a super-distant thing for me.)

:highfive: Apparently I'm British and Scottish royalty, because my great^x grandfather was James II & VII, and Irish peasant, because my great-great grandmother (on the other side) was from County Clare.

I've literally been oppressing myself.

No, the problem is that policy is preventing their incomes from rising.

Yes, the policy known as Private Property Rights.

 

[Traitorfish]

I assumed you were working class like me.

With your system, I couldn't really be sure know. Taking directly from my parents, I'm lower-middle class (of the newly-minted sort that still eats "tea", sits in the "front room" and wouldn't know a sun-dried tomato if it bit them), but back from that I'm various shades of working class, and within a few generations, you're hitting peasants out in the Gaeltacht. (Great-great grandad came from Donegal to Ayrshire because the farm went to his brother, f'rexample.) So if class is just a matter of inherited culture, and I have peasant ancestors within living memory, then I can't be sure where we stopped being peasants and started being whatever else. I mean, you say yourself, a toff can put on a pitman's had and he'd still be a toff, so doesn't the same apply to a Highland crofter?

 

[Disgustipated]

Anyways, I can't find a definitive answer on wiki. It seems the middle class has shrunk in the 2000's. Much of that is due to housing costs rising too fast, and pricing everyone out of the ability to own a home.

The notion that the middle class is shrinking is controversial because the economic boundaries that define the middle class vary. Households that earn between $25,000 and $75,000 represent approximately the middle half of the income distribution tables provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. Over the past two decades, the number of households in those brackets decreased by 3.9%, from 48.2% to 44.3%. During the same time period, the number of households with incomes below $25,000 decreased 3.5%, from 28.7% to 25.2%, while the number of households with incomes above $75,000 increased over 7%, from 23.2% to 30.4%.[44] A possible explanation for the increase in the higher earnings categories is that more households now have two wage earners.[45] However, a closer analysis reveals all of the 7% increase can be found in households who earn over $100,000.[44]

Judging from these numbers, the middle class is shrinking, but so is the lower class (below $25,000). Which seems to indicate to me that people are getting richer, not poorer.

 

[Oruc]

nope!

 

[Traitorfish]

Isn't the working class just modern day peasants? Instead of working the land they worked in factories, mines and shipyards

Not really. That would imply that "peasantry" and "working class" is just a matter of periodisation, like "Anglo-Saxon" and "English", but in fact there are major sociological distinctions between the two, most significantly the fact that the two had very different relationships to the land they worked. The urban equivalent of a peasant, to the extent that one existed, would be the independent craftsman, not the wage-worker. (Their rural equivalent, rather, were agricultural labourers, who were the predominant agricultural workforce in England, the Scottish Lowlands and parts of Ireland, but not in the Gaeltacht/Gàidhealtachd, where most of my family came from, which was still largely populated by tenants and small proprietors.)

 

[Quackers]

With your system, I couldn't really be sure know. Taking directly from my parents, I'm lower-middle class (of the newly-minted sort that still eats "tea", sits in the "front room" and wouldn't know a sun-dried tomato if it bit them), but back from that I'm various shades of working class, and within a few generations, you're hitting peasants out in the Gaeltacht. (Great-great grandad came from Donegal to Ayrshire because the farm went to his brother, f'rexample.) So if class is just a matter of inherited culture, and I have peasant ancestors within living memory, then I can't be sure where we stopped being peasants and started being whatever else. I mean, you say yourself, a toff can put on a pitman's had and he'd still be a toff, so doesn't the same apply to a Highland crofter?

You don't live in Islington but your an oppressor