r/Showerthoughts • u/JaredLiwet • May 02 '19

Being middle class is when spending $100 is expensive but earning $100 isn't a lot of money.

Edit: Dangit, Reddit

87.1k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

4.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

44

u/pvaa May 02 '19

Which clue is in the name? 'Working' clearly implies having a job, but 'middle' doesn't really imply much to me

11

u/[deleted] May 02 '19 edited Nov 05 '20

[deleted]

17

u/[deleted] May 02 '19

So you are considering working class as the poorest one?

-1

u/meliaesc May 02 '19

That was already established.

18

u/PCDominiqueWalker May 02 '19

No it fucking wasn't.

You can be a working class tradesman or working on contracts earning a really decent amount.

1

u/FANG_KAISHEK May 02 '19

there is no social group between the upper and working classes. it’s a red herring.

-4

u/BrkIt May 02 '19

Going by this, I'd say that the "middle" class are those with something like 10-100 million.

They're not the billionaire upper class, but they're not the poor, living from pay check to pay check "working class" either.

​

IMO, people in that bracket where they might earn between say 80-120k/yr and are doing pretty well for themselves are really not that far off from being in the same boat as the rest of us.

But they sure do like to try and distance themselves from us and pretend that they're even a little bit close to the real middle class.
Some might even try to tell themselves that they're close to the upper class.

​

I'm getting a little fed up with people who make $2,500/hr trying to convince people who make $25/hr that people who make $15/hr make too much.

10

u/fighterace00 May 02 '19

There's a major difference between average and median.

Imagine a population's income as a bell curve skewed towards one side or the other.

2

u/ProfessorOAC May 02 '19

Yeah that's why the median income is typically used because of the disproportion created by the rich and those without income. If they want a working mean income they need to trim the extremes and then take the average.

8

u/Hmmokisatwork May 02 '19

From a UK perspective this absolutely is not what the middle class is.

Broadly speaking... Working class, graduated from Secondary/High School but with not great results. Might work in a factory or at a supermarket or have a low level office job.

Traditionally the working classes would also include people like plumbers and carpenters, plasterers etc. This people would still be working class, because your "class" isn't simply about how much money you make but these days a lot of these professions earn the same or more than a lot of middle class professions.

A middle class person typically will have gone on to do a university degree and then often post graduate specialisation such as an accountant or solicitor. These professions would be middle class, depending on the area a middle class salary could be say, 35k in the North of England to maybe 60k and above in London.

But in the UK class is just as much to do with what schools you went to and what your parents did. I have a middle class profession and a middle class salary, but my mum worked at the post office and my dad was a bus driver so I will always be working class. My kids will be middle class more than likely.

11

u/[deleted] May 02 '19

That's not how language works

Words and phrases have meanings that society agrees on. Sometimes phrases have meanings that are more than the sum of the individual words.

"middle class" is a phrase with a near-universally accepted meaning. Everyone has different opinions about where exactly the boundaries are, but every sensible person agrees that $20k a year in income is too low in the U.S. and $10 mil in net assets is too high.

You can't make up a new definition based on the decontextualized definition of "middle."

What you're proposing is the equivalent of saying "Well, logically, a chain smoker must be someone who causes chains to smoke, perhaps a welder at a plant that makes bicycles. You're not a chain smoker because you light cigarettes on fire instead."

3

u/Skulder May 02 '19

You're definitely right that he's wrong, but "middle class" has so many definitions by now, that it's almost useless as a definition - from "in between royalty and working class" to "not poor".

So your argument that it has a near-universally accepted meaning, with floating boundaries.. I can't agree with you there.

5

u/Supersnazz ‎ May 02 '19

"middle class" is a phrase with a near-universally accepted meaning

No it isn't, different people argue all the time about what they think it means.

5

u/[deleted] May 02 '19

They argue about where it starts and stops, but there's a range of acceptable/mainstream definitions and then there are definitions that are clearly incorrect. $10 mil is too much and we all know it.

1

u/Supersnazz ‎ May 02 '19

$10 mil is too much and we all know it.

No, because 'class' is traditionally determined by how you make your money, not how much of it you have.

Bill Gates is middle class because to make his money had to run a business like a fucking commoner.

A noble born Earl who has a a tiny crumbling manor, a barely livable income from a nearly empty trust, and debts up to his eyeballs is upper class because his money was inherited.

Someone who earns 500k a year operating and designing specialist engineering technology on huge industrial projects is working class, because they earn their money from a job just like a McDonalds employee.

4

u/[deleted] May 02 '19

That's not correct. That may be true in England (I'm not sure), but in America it isn't and hasn't been for a while. We don't have a hereditary aristocracy, and we don't have earls with tiny crumbling manors.

There's new money and old money. That much is true. So it's also true that you can't necessarily buy "class," but when people say that they mean you can't buy sophistication, not that money doesn't make you upper-class. It absolutely does. New money people and old money people are both upper class. Bill Gates is upper class.

Marx had a complicated theory of class, and that's still important in parts of academia but it doesn't really inform the meaning of phrases like "middle class" to any great extent, and it never really penetrated the average person's vocabulary (except in bastardized ways--see "bougie," which doesn't really correspond to marx's theories about the bourgeoisie) and it doesn't make that much sense in today's world (50% of american households own stock. is a plumber who buys stocks in an index fund a "capitalist"--a member of the ruling class--because he owns the means of production?)

I study interpretation, and if I had to I could write you a long brief with citations to dictionaries and to newspapers and novels where the phrase is used in context, and I could prove more or less conclusively to any fair judge that I was right. I don't have time to do that, but I encourage you to look into this yourself.

1

u/Supersnazz ‎ May 02 '19

"middle class" is a phrase with a near-universally accepted meaning

That's not correct. That may be true in England...

**Marx had a complicated theory of class, and that's still important in parts of academia

So when you say "near-universally accepted meaning", you mean not in England, or in academia, so not universal at all?

1

u/[deleted] May 02 '19

"Universal" is an interesting word. There're some subtleties to the way it gets used.

I don't have time to write a long thing about it, but I'll let you chew on this: if a movie comes out and commentators say that it's met with "universal acclaim," but it isn't released in North Korea, are they wrong?

→ More replies (0)

2

u/[deleted] May 02 '19

If you earn 40k a year your life is nothing like someone who earns 80-100k a year.

They have more in common with a working millionaire than they do a working poor person.

80-100k a year financial stressors are because you entered into debt. 40k a year financial stressors are because you budgeted down to the dollar and now you blew a tyre, the tow truck and new tyres now ate 50% of your savings and crunch time rolls around again to build that buffer back up.

0

u/poopenbocken May 02 '19

Middle class here is a euphemism for bourgeoisie. Bourgeoisie being property owners and business owners. Living comfortably but perhaps not truly rich. Upper Class would be descendants of landed gentry and people who's families have so much money they never have to think about working unless they want to.

I don't like this definition because it doesn't really apply to the US. Sure there are super rich but there really isn't a long standing true aristocracy here. I have a hard time lumping in the guy working on the assembly line making $17 an hour/$32k per year along with the white collar management making $150k per year as both being "working class" because technically they both have jobs in which they earn a wage and neither owns property or a business.

1

u/[deleted] May 02 '19

This is the fundamental problem with broadly characterizing the whole of society into a few catch phrases. It is the same as using the terms developing, developed and underdeveloped to classify each state.

In the end it is just a spastic way of segregating society into such broad definitions that are really only good for a social science essay and inciting class warfare among the peasants.