Both political parties talk about having a large and growing middle class, yet from what I know of history (and it is I admit somewhat limited) most societies seemed to have a small rich ruling class, a small middle class of merchants and craftsmen, and a large poor class just getting by. It seems like only in the last century or so a large middle class has developed and that mainly in the western world with a few exceptions. Is it possible that the natural state of human societies is not to have a large middle class and it is unsustainable? The natural state is a few rich, a slightly larger number of highly skilled people, and a large number of poor who are placated with “bread and circuses”(wiki the term for a full explanation). Or in this day “bread and pokemon”.
It certainly is a historical aberration brought on by the combination of industrialization, mass education, and the labor movement. Today, only one of these pillars still exists(education), and the amount of education required to have marketable skills in the future economy is going to leave a lot of people behind.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom. If sufficient wealth is generated, no one need be deprived of anything essential. Picture a world in which most things are automated and the only people with ways of making money are founders of companies, CEOs, executives, and highly skilled tech people. And of course athletes and entertainers. Those would be the elite. In the middle class you’d have people who are still doing the jobs that for whatever reason robots aren’t suitable for no matter how advanced their intellect. And then there’d be the 80% who seem to have no place. If enough wealth is being generated, you could say, give everyone in the bottom 80% the equivalent of a 6-figure income while the elite pull down billions and those who are skilled or talented enough to gain employment could make millions. Assuming an economy large enough, it would take a lot less in taxes to pay for that than the rich pay today.
There was a comparatively large middle class in England in the 18th century, consisting mainly of shopkeepers, tradesman, innkeepers and freehold farmers. They were fairly prosperous, and social mobility was also far higher than in most other countries.
It was fairly common for a wealthy businessman to send his sons to elite schools and then Oxford and Cambridge, and in another generation they could become members of the peerage.
This was unheard of in 18th century France, for example. The lack of a middle class in France was a major contributing factor to the French Revolution.
I object to the term “middle class” as it’s most often used. It is a slippery, often basis-free term used as much to mask specifics as state them. Yes, yes, I know what it means, and you know what it means, and HRC knows what it means, and the unemployed MBA on the barstool knows what it means… but odds are none of us would define it in anything like the same way. Political types love it because they can use it to describe completely different populations as it suits them, and each of those populations hears what they want to hear.
Vaguely intending “not poor but not rich” covers about $300,000 in household income range. If not more. The two-income family just barely prospering and the now-employed MBA pulling down $250k are both “middle class” by most sweeping definitions… which makes the description useless.
If you can’t define the socioeconomic class you are really talking about, using “middle class” to approximate it is less useful than waving your hand and saying “them people over there”… on the radio.
So the answer to the OP’s question is going to be nothing but a long exchange of opinions that may be individually valid and correct, but are chalk, cheese and chimichangas vs each other.
Middle class are just wealthy commoners, typically someone who has to work for their wealth. The Upper class are people who have wealth bestowed upon them, without having to work. A typical lord collects rents on the first of the month, pays bills on the second; that’s leaves quite a bit of free time to enjoy the luxuries of life.
A better way to judge is which tax forms one fills out, the commoner tax form (schedule C) or the elite tax form (schedule E) … or does your employer pay your taxes …
To the OP … yes … a large middle class is a historical aberation. Before 1602, it all but didn’t exist; we had nobility and we had serfs, and basically nothing in between.
I know quite a few people who work and are anything but wealthy; I know a fair number who would be considered wealthy and earned every dime.
You also need to define “commoners” since nobility is an almost wholly irrelevant term outside of England.
Is it really hard to define upper and lower brackets in reasonably absolute terms for this central socioeconomic class?
The core of the problem is that too many people are pulling a 1955 and assuming the family economics of that era were normality, instead of a substantial aberration itself. So we really can’t just handwave away the definition of the specific group you’re trying to talk about.
Was there a middle class before the Industrial Revolution in the sense we know it? I thought most people had few possessions, maybe a few coins to carry, and anyone who had more than that would be wealthy. Maybe at the bottom of the wealth scale, but at least they owned some things of value.
Yes, ancient Rome (from about the start of the Gaarchi era to about the end of the crises of Third Century), the Arab caliphate till at least the late part of the middle ages, and many of the various Chinese dynasties to name a few all had very large percentages of the populace who were in positions we would now call middle class.
Professionals, merchants, shopkeepers, small businessman, civil servants.
The French revolution was mostly a middle class event; it was the pressures on this class which caused the revolution, not its absence.
And if you include farmers, there are as many parts (in time and space) of the European Middle Ages where there are lots of those making a decent living as there are where the only landowner is the local baron. At least two of the largest Spanish cities were ruled by the merchant-and-artisan class through more of the Christian era than not (Barcelona, Valencia), in the form of Consells (Parliaments) where the only noble present would be the Count or King (respectively). While there were for example a lot more servants than the same population would have now, there were a lot more merchants and artisans than people tend to picture.
Of course it’s an aberration. So what?
Electricity is an aberration.
And so is using flush toilets.
And not dying from childhood diseases.
There is no “natural state” of human society in modern times.
For 4000 years, there was a stable, natural state. But only because there was no technology, and therefore no other options.
But for the past couple centuries, we’ve been making new rules, with huge changes in every generation.
Perhaps politicians speak about the middle class is that’s where most of the voters are. Thehigher the income, the more likely you are to vote. And there’s less people the higher up the income goes.
Al;though it is not described as such; American certainly does have a nobility. The Kennedys, Bush’s, Rockefellers,
Kerry’s Clintons, and numerous other families with vast inherited wealth and disproportionate influence. If they are not a nobility, I don’t know what is.
I disagree, the aristocracy was wide-spread in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Better to say that nobility is an almost wholly irrelevant term inside the United States. The Constitution specifically forbids such a social class. The definition of commoner is easy, anyone whose two married parents aren’t nobility.
11th Century Europe has two classes, nobility and the serfs. Even by 1602, the merchant class was still tiny, there were very few places this commoner wealth was tolerated. Today there’s an abundance of wealth, the rich can be rich without making everyone else poor. Ask me to pick the day I’d pick January 5, 1914. From this day forward the middle class exploded. This is the day Henry Ford announced his $5 a day wages for his workers. The day the workers could afford to buy the products they were making.
The biggest “aberration” is the green revolution - industrial conversion of farming processes. Until the advent of farm machinery following the industrial evolution, the vast majority of population were farmers. Depending on the productivity of their farms (and level of taxes) a farm could be dirt poor to moderately prosperous - but then, moderately prosperous implied a decent number of dirt-poor farm hands or slaves before mechanization, so no gain there.
there was always a non-nobility trader and craftsman class that prospered. In some civilizations it prospered more than others, and was often a stepping stone for the more successful to buy their way into nobility within a few generations.
the real aberration is the size of the 20th century middle class. Perhaps, too, that industrialization not only produced a surplus of food, but also the other goods that made a middle class lifestyle possible; machines substituted for labour. A sewing machine, for example, made clothes in less than 1/10 the time that it would take to sew by hand; so it’s as if any tailor has 10 low-paid labourers helping him (or more accurately, moderately well-trained seamstresses). Each step of technological progress has amplified that cadre of ghost labourers supporting the average Joe, as what were rare hand-made goods are mass produced in factories.
But the Amateur Barbarian is right about our civilization. When we say “middle class” we no longer mean the person who does not have to dawn to dusk, makes their own clothes, and barely has enough to eat. Lower class means someone enjoying(?) the lower end of the pay scale, fewer of the goodies civilization offers, and longer or more strenuous working conditions.
So, the trick is to properly define middle class.
In most places around the world, throughout most of history, about 95% of the population farmed. Some farmed for themselves, some gave their crops to their liege, a few sold crops to cities, some but none of them would normally be classified as middle class.
This lasted until the industrial revolution. Since that hit different countries at different times, the possibility of a sizable middle class developed at different times. Britain was first. The U.S. followed later. However, the vast majority of those who left farms became industrial workers. They could not be thought of as middle class by any reasonable definition, even in the U.S., until after WWII. The lack of education forbade that, with fewer than half the population graduating high school. Because of the GI Bill and the gains unions made after the war, with guaranteed jobs, high salaries, and pensions in a world with cheaply affordable housing, the middle class expanded to take in most of the population. This was probably not true anywhere else in the world for decades.
Remember that the 1950s are the U.S. definition of “normal.” This is historically insane, and was contemporaneously insane when looking at the state of the rest of the world after WWII. But it has become ingrained in American thought. It’s like an urban legend taking over reality.
You don’t know what it is. 
Certainly nobility existed until perhaps a hundred years ago, with pretty much the last of it, Brits aside, going down in flames after WWI. But the question is about a modern, localized class. Trying to ring in an obsolete class for comparative purposes is… not useful.
There is almost certainly not one definition - that’s the problem. I’d like to see the term discarded from all modern discussion and replaced with more meaningful, defined categories we might now vaguely refer to “middle class” “upper middle class” “lower middle class” and other “we both know what I mean, right?” terms.
And it’s taken forever for this idea to take hold. Right through the recent crash, people who should have known MUCH better were holding out for what I’ve pinned as “1955” - an idealized vision of what we’ve spent fifty years believing was a norm, and a norm only “that guy” or “those people” were keeping us from attaining.
The postwar decades were an irreproducible anomaly and no amount of political hot air or pitchfork mobs (or superwhiz financial manipulation) is going to bring them back.
I’ve just been reading “The Silk Roads” by Peter Frankopan. The book is not primarily concerned with the relative size of different classes across eras, but one of his points is that after the fall of Rome and until the crusades and really until the Age of Exploration, most of Europe was poor, barbarous, and ill-educated. China and the “Middle East” were where we should look to find a middle class, as they were where the well-developed polities were. And indeed there was a good living to be made for traders and artisans and civil servants in those places and at those times.
This sentence is certainly true. But what percentage of the population were they? My understanding is single digits.
The difference is both qualitative and quantitative. You cannot compare 8% to 80%.
Yes, I didn’t mean to say that the middle class of those times and places was necessarily comparable in size to the middle class of 1955 America, only to point (and I should have been clearer about this) that there are other ways of assessing whether a middle class is a historical aberration besides taking periods of European history as benchmarks.