Upper Middle Class: A Separate Entity from the Middle Class?

Jumpin-Jack-Flash · February 20, 2014, 7:09pm

In your opinion, what differentiates the upper-middle-class from the middle-class? Are they really different? If so, what makes the upper middle class a separate entity?

Wesley_Clark · February 20, 2014, 11:01pm

Usually how much education they have, and how much prestige their careers have as well as how few people are trained to do it. Upper middle class usually have graduate degrees and prestigious careers paying 60k+ a year. Middle class have associate or bachelor degrees and jobs paying in the 35-50k range.

Income helps separate them, but I don’t know to what degree. Plus with income the COL varies so drastically from city to city.

pancakes3 · February 21, 2014, 1:04am

I’d say so. The difference between middle class and upper middle class might not have a lot of difference as far as gross wages but the disposable income is much higher. That means international vacations instead of road trips to the lake, individual bedrooms/cars for the kids, and just nicer things all together.

ThisUsernameIsForbidden · February 21, 2014, 1:28am

An arbitrary line.

Stratification exists.

“Entity” poor choice of words, ‘class’ was just fine.

BrainGlutton · February 21, 2014, 1:56am

From Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (originally published 1983), by Paul Fussell:

My researches have persuaded me that there are nine classes in this country, as follows:

Top out-of-sight
Upper
Upper middle

Middle
High proletarian
Mid-proletarian
Low proletarian

Destitute
Bottom out-of-sight

One thing to get clear at the outset is this: it’s not riches alone that define these classes. . . . “Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor,” says George Orwell, “but socially there is a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but – this is the essential point – generally persist from birth to death. . . . It is . . . very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you have been born.” When John Fitzgerald Kennedy, watching Richard Nixon on television, turned to his friends and, horror-struck, said, “The guy has no class,” he was not talking about money.

<snip>

We now come to the upper-middle class. It may possess virtually as much as the two classes above it. The difference is that it has earned most of it, in law, medicine, oil, shipping, real estate, or even the more honorific kinds of trade, like buying and selling works of art. Although they may enjoy some inherited money and use inherited “things” (silver, Oriental rugs), the upper-middles suffer from a bourgeois sense of shame, a conviction that to live on the earnings of others, even forebears, is not nice.

Caste marks of the upper-middles would include living in a house with more rooms than you need, except perhaps when a lot of “overnight guests” are present to help you imitate upper-class style. . . . This class is also the most “role-reversed” of all: men think nothing of cooking and doing housework, women of working out of the house in journalism, theater, or real estate. (If the wife stays home all the time, the family’s middle-class only.) Upper-middles like to show off their costly educations by naming their cats Spinoza, Clytemnestra, and Candide, which means, as you’ll have inferred already, that it’s in large part the class depicted by Lisa Birnbach and others’ Official Preppy Handbook, that significantly popular artifact of 1980.

<snip>

. . . The middle class is distinguishable more by its earnestness and psychic insecurity than by its middle income. I have known some very rich people who remain stubbornly middle-class, which is to say they remain terrified at what others think of them, and to avoid criticism are obsessed with doing everything right. . . .

“Status panic”: that’s the affliction of the middle class, according to C. Wright Mills, author of White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956). Hence the middles’ need to accumulate credit cards and take in The New Yorker, which it imagines registers upper-middle taste. . . .

If the audience for that sort of thing used to seem the most deeply rooted in time and place, today it seems the class that’s the most rootless. Members of the middle class are not only the sort of people who buy their own heirlooms, silver, etc. They’re also the people who do most of the moving long-distance (generally to very unstylish places), commanded every few years to pull up stakes by the corporations they’re in bondage to. They are the geologist employed by the oil company, the computer programmer, the aeronautical engineer, the salesman assigned to a new territory, and the “marketing” (formerly sales) manager deputed to keep an eye on him. . . . IBM and DuPont hire these people from second-rate colleges and teach them that they are nothing if not members of the team. Virtually no latitude is permitted to individuality or the milder forms of eccentricity, and these employees soon learn to avoid all ideological statements. . . . Terrified of losing their jobs, these people grow passive, their humanity diminished as they perceive themselves mere parts of an infinitely larger structure. Interchangeable parts, too. “The training makes our men interchangeable,” an IBM executive was once heard to say.

. . . Oddity, introversion, and love of privacy are the big enemies, a total reversal of the values of the secure upper orders. Among the middles there’s a convention that erecting a fence or even a tall hedge is an affront. And there’s also a convention that you may drop in on neighbors and friends without a telephone inquiry first. . . .

zoid · February 21, 2014, 2:07am

I believe there’s a distinction.
In my minds eye:
middle class
upper middle class

BrainGlutton · February 21, 2014, 10:53pm

This is Michael Lind’s description of the American “white overclass,” which includes the upper-middle and all above it. From The Next American Nation:

Understanding the white overclass requires revising the most common misconceptions about class. The discussion of social class has been confused for generations by Marxist thinkers, who made the mistake of completely identifying class with economic function. Like the Marxists, old-fashioned American liberal pluralists tend to misunderstand class. What they refer to as class is typically not a social class at all, but a mere occupational or income category, such as service-sector workers or millionaires. Meanwhile, the New Left which came to prominence in the sixties has tended to drop the idea of class altogether, in favor of race and gender. . . . In recent years, conservative ideologues have added further confusion by defining political factions and lifestyle subcultures as classes. . . .

In order to think about class in twenty-first century America, we must first clear our minds of these Marxist, liberal, New Left, and conservative definitions of class, and return to the older notion of class found in classical and European political thought from Aristotle to Montesquieu.

A class is a group of families, united by intermarriage and a common subculture, whose members tend to predominate in certain professions and political offices, generation after generation. Note that the class – the group of similar families – has an existence independent of the offices which its members tend to hold. Indeed, we cannot talk intelligently about class unless we make a distinction between a social class and a mere institutional elite. Those who talk about “the political class” or, with C. Wright Mills, about “the power elite,” are confusing two very different things. Every modern society, even the most perfectly egalitarian, will have an institutional elite – top civilian politicians, military officers, judges, diplomats, financial and industrial executives, publishers, editors and leading intellectuals, clerical leaders, and so on. The subject of class is raised only when you examine the social origins of the particular individuals who hold office in the institutional elite or elites. Learning the organization of judicial offices in a country tells you nothing about class. However, if you find out that most of the judges tend to come from old-money families in a particular region of that country, and that most attended one of half a dozen schools, then you have learned something important about that country’s class system.

The United States at the end of the twentieth century has both an institutional elite and a dominant social class. The institutional elite is composed of upper-level officials in the federal and state governments, plus executives and professionals in the concentrated private sector and foundation and university executives (low-level government officials and small business owners are not part of the institutional elite). Almost all of the members of the American institutional elite also happen to be members of a single social class: the white overclass. To put it another way, the labor pool from which most elite positions are filled is the white overclass. The overlap is not complete. Though most members of the institutional elite belong to the white overclass, most members of the white overclass are not part of the institutional elite (since the overclass greatly outnumbers the elite); and – though this is uncommon – a person can become a high-ranking politician, military officer, judge, CEO, foundation president, or university president in the United States without having been born into the white overclass. It is possible to imagine a United States in which most members of the institutional elite did not have similar class origins. But that is not the country in which we live.

. . . The white overclass is the child of the former Northeastern Protestant establishment, produced by marriage (not only figurative but literal) with the upwardly mobile descendants of turn-of-the-century European immigrants and white Southerners and Westerners. Unlike the Northeastern establishment . . . this relatively new and still evolving political and social oligarchy is not identified with any particular region of the country (though it is concentrated in East and West Coast metropolitan regions). Nor does the white overclass dominate other sections through local, surrogate establishments, as the Northeastern establishment once did. Rather, overclass Americans are found in the higher suburbs of every major metropolitan area, North and South, coastal and inland. Unlike the sectional elites of the past, members of the white overclass are not even identified with the regions in which they happen (temporarily) to live. The white overclass, homogeneous and nomadic, is the first truly national upper class in American history.

The white overclass is the product, not merely of the amalgamation of Anglo- and Euro-Americans, but of the fusion of the rentier and managerial-professional classes. This blurring of the upper and upper-middle strata is a relatively new development in the United States. In earlier generations, there were distinct landowning and rentier classes, with their own lifestyles and institutions – cotillions, seasons spent in the country, and the like. The elaborate rituals that governed upper-class life, such as dressing for dinner, were designed to conspicuously display wealth, including a wealth of leisure time. That was a long time ago. There is a class, or rather a category, of the celebrity rich, and there are still pockets of old-fashioned rentiers in the U.S. – in Virginia, there are still planters who do not work and who hunt foxes with hounds – but these subcultures are detached from the summits of power. Members of the upper class who want to make a mark in the world tend to adopt the style of life and dress and speech of the managerial-professional elite. Even though they do not have to, most members of the small hereditary upper class go to college and get executive or professional jobs, and work, or at least pretend to. Instead of serving as a model for well-to-do executives and lawyers and investment bankers, the hereditary segment of the American overclass conforms to the segment immediately below it, the credentialed upper middle class.

. . . The composition of student bodies at Ivy League schools is a good surrogate for the composition of the white overclass. If you factor out black and Hispanic students admitted under affirmative action programs, you are left with a student body that is disproportionately of British or German-Scandinavian Protestant and European Jewish descent. There are relatively few evangelical Protestants and Catholics in the overclass, despite their significant numbers in the general population. If you are Episcopalian or Jewish, have a graduate or professional degree from an expensive university, work in a large downtown office building in an East or West Coast metropolis, watch MacNeil/Lehrer on PBS, and are saving for a vacation in London or Paris, you are a card-carrying member of the white overclass, even if your salary is not very impressive. If you are Methodist, Baptist or Catholic, have a B.A. from a state university, work in or for a small business or for a career government service, watch the Nashville Network on cable, and are saving for a vacation in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Branson, Missouri, or Orlando, Florida (Disneyworld), you are probably not a member of the white overclass – no matter how much money you make.

Although there are residual religious and ethnic differences among members of the white overclass, these are minor compared to what they have in common. There is, for example, a common white overclass accent, which is more or less identical in corporate boardrooms from one end of the continent to another – the “NBC standard,” which is the equivalent of BBC English or Britain’s Received Pronunciation (RP). As formerly distinct local elites have fused into a single national ruling class equally at home in New York and Texas and California, this accent has become the badge of elite status. In order to advance in overclass circles in America, a white American has to suppress any regional or ethnic dialect, whether it be a Southern drawl or a Boston honk or Brooklynese, and learn to speak this flat, clipped, rather nasal version of English. . . .

. . . The overclass eats pate and imported cheeses; the middle class eats peanut butter and Velveeta. The overclass sips wine; the middle class drinks beer. The overclass plays squash and tennis; the middle class plays pool and bowls (both golf, but the middle class does so at second-tier country clubs and public courses). The overclass jogs; the middle class does not. . . . These are cliches, but they are a better guide to the real class structure in the United States than income categories in the census or pseudoscientific sociological measures like the SES (socioeconomic survey).

Jumpin-Jack-Flash · February 23, 2014, 7:20pm

I agree. Unfortunately, it’s one of my favourite words lately.

msmith537 · February 23, 2014, 7:57pm

The middle class think a career that pays $60k a year is “prestigious”. The upper middle class know how much a career that pays $160k a year really isn’t in the grand scheme of things.

Jumpin-Jack-Flash · February 23, 2014, 8:19pm

In Britain and Europe we tend not to divide the middle class up into separate classes. Traditionally, we saw the world through a three class system consisting of the Upper Class, Middle Class and Working Class. While money played a role it was far from the major determining factor of which category you were in (born into). The poor and the destitute were lumped into the working-class, just as the educated professionals, wealthy entrepreneurs and humble office clerk were deemed middle-class. However, in my opinion I’d say over the last 40-50 years this system of stratification has changed to some degree. Since the disappearance of manufacturing it seems many of the former blue-collar, semi-skilled factory workers had been replaced by uniformed and white collar service employees, many of whom are on minimum wage. In times past, the urge would have been to group these people in the middle-class just for the simple reason most do not perform manual labour. Today, however, this element is almost uniformly lumped into the working-class. The poor and the destitute no longer seem to be referred to as working-class. Often, they are politely referred to as a Benefits Class, thus, a new category has been created. This leads me to my next point and that is the middle-class in Britain and Europe seems to have been sub-divided. Quite often I am now running into the terms ‘upper-middle-class’ and ‘lower-middle-class’, which previously I think were largely seen as American constructs. This makes me wonder if this highly educated and often affluent professional/managerial class, a.k.a. upper-middle-class, has become part of the lexicon as a result of the increase of disparity in wealth and income in most Western capitalist societies?

Terr · February 23, 2014, 8:27pm

Wow. If “The Middle” depicts a middle class family, then I don’t know what lower class is. Do you have to live in a cardboard box to be out of middle class range?

Terr · February 23, 2014, 8:29pm

Upper-middle-class, if they have to stop working, can survive 5-10 years easily. Middle class in the same circumstances - one year to a few years. Upper class - indefinitely.

pancakes3 · February 25, 2014, 4:29pm

By that definition, no young person can be upper middle class regardless of income. I don’t know any one in their 20’s who would be able to live 5 years off their savings/assets alone. I’m not sure there are any in their 30’s who can either.

Terr · February 25, 2014, 4:35pm

From income alone - no. So?

Shagnasty · February 25, 2014, 4:35pm

I would say that the ability to live off of savings for X period of time is not a requirement for either the middle class or upper-middle class. Plenty of upper middle-class people would go broke extremely quickly if they stopped working for whatever reason because they carry large mortgages and have high expenses in general. That applies to doctors and other professional way more often than not yet they are considered upper-middle class.

To me, upper-middle class implies a high-income and a certain lifestyle but it says nothing about overall assets or true wealth. By some definitions, wealth (outside of retirement savings) and the ability to choose whether to work or not is only a requirement to be in the upper-class. Upper-middle class people may be able to choose to allow one spouse to stay home but they will still take a lifestyle hit for that choice.

Lemur866 · February 25, 2014, 4:42pm

If you have to work for a living, you are middle class no matter what your income level. A doctor or lawyer or manager or sales director who makes $500,000 a year is upper middle class because if they stopped working they’d have to drastically cut back their budget. To be truly upper class you can’t have earned your own money, you have to inherit it.

Malthus · February 25, 2014, 5:03pm

Upper-middle class is a designation most often used for those who must work for a paycheque, but who work in a “profession” that is accorded more social respect (and typically but not always higher pay) than the average working professional.

Typical examples are doctors and lawyers.

That it is not strictly tied to pay is demonstrated by the fact that university professors are generally accorded upper-middle class status (if they have tenure). In their case, they have the status because it is very difficult to become a tenured university professor and such have reasonably high social status.

Upper middle class status is not necessarily linked with wealth accumulation, and in fact, it is relatively common for people in this category to have their spending outstrip their income.

On the other hand, people who own businesses can be ‘upper-middle class’ if the business is wealthy enough, and they can accumulate the trappings of wealth commonly associated with upper-middle-classdom - for example, a nice detached house (if living in a major city), and the ability to hire personal servants if necessary (typically, a nanny for the kids, or a nurse/assistant for elders living at home).

Terr · February 25, 2014, 5:06pm

Bull. Plenty of upper class people who have earned their own money. Including fabulously wealthy ones.

BrainGlutton · February 25, 2014, 5:28pm

Young upper-class people have trust funds.

BrainGlutton · February 25, 2014, 5:29pm

But that raises an important point: Plenty of self-made rich people have not joined the upper class and never will no matter how much money they have. It’s a function of whom you might conceivably marry, among other things. Not even Bill Gates, I think, is part of the upper class really. Their children or grandchildren might join the upper class – but, they have to be properly acculturated to qualify, and being the right color is all but indispensable; there is not really any nonwhite upper class in America. Yet.