Enidigm
3758
That’s true, it’s also why these “300k in California is the same as 100k in Arkansas” lines grate me somewhat, because it assumes a lack of fungibility which isn’t true. Unless you’re renting the person that sells their home making 300k a year in CA can afford to retire to AR… the reverse is not true. That 300k will come out of the wash eventually.
Effectively it’s the Wall Street Journal cartoon of sad Helen Hunt only making due on a quarter million a year. It’s had waving all “those folk” in flyover country as living high on the hog, as they say, without really thinking hard about the long term consequences of that unequal income.
But really the main article seemed to be peeves at the growth of effectively overqualified full time nannies.
I was about to repost that great portrait of upper-middle class Americans. :P
Ex-SWoo
3760
I guess I have more of an issue with the cutoff line than the general premise. I don’t really see someone in the 91 percentile in a different class than someone in the 85th. (which is about a $30k difference according to this calc ).
If we’re talking about the top 5% I’d be in full agreement.
It’s never going to be a clear line, but in economics the middle class cutoff is twice the median, where income normally starts outpacing necessary expenses. That’s normally going to fall at 15-20% of top income earners in the US. So somewhere close to 82% according to your calculator and 2021’s median ($80k per household). The difference is not going to be between somebody at 85-91% but between 75% and 85%. Which is “only” about $50k but also a 42% increase in income from the 70% (at $120k), which is a really significant lifestyle change.
Kind of. I have first hand experience with this with my brother who is a doctor. He’s always grousing about how he doesn’t have enough money to send his kids to the Ivy league schools that will ensure that his kids will have the guaranteed success they deserve given how smart they are. I keep telling him his kids will be fine no matter where they go. After his daughter came back from spending an exchange year in Germany in high school, completely fluent in German, someone from the State Department tried recruiting her at a gathering in DC, saying she should go a certain school in Scotland to guarantee success and she’ll be working at the State Department after that. It turns out after she applied there, her grades were good enough to get only a $40k a year scholarship, not a full scholarship, so my brother couldn’t afford to send her there.
That’s just one example, but I mean, there’s always something that’s stressing him out about how he doesn’t have enough money, and the government is always trying to take more of it away.
Enidigm
3763
The one thing that is clear is that 90% of college is networking. Education itself is kind of a given. All these kids wracking up 100k in student loans from State State university are probably never going to pay them off because those schools are unlikely to give them access to the real sources of employment. Meeting some people who will hook you up with a 45k a year accounting job in your hometown probably isn’t a payoff that made that education make sense. The reason getting into the Ivys matter more than ever is getting access to that finance capital.
Oh, he hasn’t moved on to his real problem being that “those people” are soaking up all the scholarships and grant money and admissions slots, and that Big Welfare is bleeding him dry via tax-and-spend Democrat policies? Color me shocked!
Anyway yes, this was covered in the “luxury SUV” portion of my TED Talk ;)
Ex-SWoo
3765
The one truism is the scarcity of similar opportunity for future generations when compared to the past. Keeping living standards consistent generation-to-generation is a nigh impossibility for most folks given the fast rise of cost increases.
Yes, it’s rentier bullshit all the way down. We love to pretend we live in a meritocracy, and you can certainly find examples all over the place about exceptional people accomplishing exceptional things, but the truth is the big picture is all about rentiers protecting their privilege through every means available to them.
Tell me that the COO earned his job by virtue of being roommates with the founder. Or that the GM is in her position because “she’s run three software companies before” (into the ground, maybe, fuuuuuuuck) and not because she’s the CEO’s sister and the primary investor’s daughter.
antlers
3767
Your criticism is absolutely irrelevant to the article, which makes the point that the name and dividing line for the class it describes are arbitrary; the defining bit is the anxiety, the self-deception, and the strategies the class uses to address them.
Unfortunately, he has. Sigh. It’s a natural progression to that line of thought isn’t it? If my son and daughter were black, they would have gotten into Harvard and been roommates with the next CEO. But they aren’t, so they can get in, but not on scholarship, so I can’t afford it thanks to tax-and-spend liberals who want to raise my taxes.
I disagree. By confounding class, the writer of the article is engaging in self-deception himself about the history of that class he’s describing. The naming and framing confounds the issue in an attempt to make an interesting point.
The strategies, anxiety, etc… are not new at all. It’s not a new phenomenon of a section of the middle class incorporating values of the upper class, it’s the upper class behaving as usual but working different jobs.
antlers
3770
He’s addressing a particular class-consciousness that is both caused by and reinforces a well-documented increase in inequality. Saying it’s the same-old thing doesn’t address the changing circumstance.
Very much this. If you define the people in the 90%-99.9% range as upper middle class, you’re including people at 99.9%, at 98%, at 95%. Those people aren’t upper middle class, they’re rich. It might be the case that they are income-rich, rather than wealth-rich, but income-rich is still rich.
antlers
3772
Networking is surely important, but I think you are underestimating how much an Ivy degree works as a pure credential. Pretty much all the people making employment and investment decisions have embraced the same meritocratic ideology, so they see the Ivy brand as a powerful endorsement of a person regardless of who that person might know.
Maybe there are issues with the specific numbers that article picked, but I think the broader point remains true–or at least, I see it frequently around me, and I’d likely feel it myself if I had kids. I don’t like it, and I fight against it, but I feel those sorts of fears occasionally gnawing at the fringes of my consciousness.
According to those links, I’m in the upper class for my metropolitan area, but having grown up in poverty (and neglect) and having gone through a bout of homelessness, I still to this day can’t shake the fear of not knowing where my next meal will come from. The instinctive drive to secure what I have now is very strong. If I had children, I think I’d have a very difficult time resisting the pull to make sure they didn’t go through the things I did.
The entire purpose of defining the middle class up to include the wealthy is to erode any natural solidarity between the working class and the poor, so as to shift policy to work better for the wealthy and worse for the poor.
Timex
3775
For reference, if you make $150k a year, it puts you in the top 10% of earners in the US.
That’s not really crazy rich. I would in fact consider that upper middle class.
I have a bit of that a generation removed. I grew up mid middle class until around middle school, in an area with significant poverty. More importantly, my parents both came from poverty and managed to increase their lot quite a bit over a couple decades - but always had that financial prudence from their early life, which I think passed onto me and my siblings. We’re all very sensitive to overspending, and especially accrual of any debt at all, even when financially quite comfortable. Sometimes to the significant annoyance of other people that think I should be spending more freely (shrug).
You may have missed this excellent post that included links. Your $150k is too low for top 10%.
