Among other things, this doesn’t work very well at all. You clearly just pulled some fool’s idiocy and plastered it all over the net, without any critical thinking.
Anthropologically, the latter tends to be far more significant (above the absolute minimum necessary for survival, of course).
The larger and more integrated the society, the greater the awareness of one’s relative status - and the greater the discontent.
Depends if the term is relative or concrete. If upper middle class means doing better than 85% of the other citizens in the nation, then you can’t have everyone doing better than 85% of everyone else.
However if it means concrete standards of living, I think it is possible but not right now due to the fact that we don’t have enough GDP wealth, we don’t have enough natural resources and our gini coefficient is too high so the wealth isn’t distributed.
The quality and quantity of transportation, leisure activities, nutrition, medicine, media, heating/cooling, etc that the lower middle class have today is better than what the upper middle class had 100 years ago. The same should be true in another 50-100 years.
I do think a true movement towards an upper middle class society would involve one that empowers labor movements and the sustainability movement. As long as our Gini coefficient keeps going up, more wealth won’t make any different in standards of living so you need a labor movement to fight for the lower classes. And w/o sustainability, we will all be fighting over natural resources.
Yep. By any measure of relative income, we are “upper middle class” - but I didn’t get a iPhone until Christmas because I couldn’t afford (didn’t choose to afford) the data plan. We don’t have cable TV. Our house is modest.
I look at some of the neighborhoods and wonder. I look at my friends who I know make much less than we do - with iPhones and motorcycles and expensive vacations, and I wonder.
Good point: we’re usually jealous of spending and consumption, yet our policies attack earnings. We’re jealous of the wealthy yet our policies attack accumulation of wealth, not the possession of it. (“Taxes on the rich” are better termed “Taxes on the high-earners” - the idle rich are pretty much unscathed.)
And on a larger level, since folks seem to acknowledge that relative status striving is the main driver of redistribution in a rich society, I would question whether jealousy is a valid reason for policy at all.
If you aren’t in debt except for your house, you’re actually in pretty good shape compared to most Americans. Luxury can be nice, but the quote I like to use is, “Live like no-one else, so later you can live like no-one else.”
It was also pretty crappy as a definition of upper middle class.
For once, I think Wikipedia’s definition(s) are more on-target: Upper middle class - Wikipedia
I think the line between “upper middle class” and “lower upper class” is very vague and nebulous.
Depart from me into the everlasting BBQ Pit.
No, it’s not nearly entertaining enough. We have enough to deal with without somebody’s pet new class theory.
If most people earned $250k a year, than that becomes the mean, right? So, by definition, the upper middle class has to be defined as (much) higher than that. It’s a gerbil treadmill!
What I would be more willing to understand is raising the standard of living for all citizens upwards. That’s not as much of a moving goal post.
Go with that. Why is it so impossible to have an intelligentsia that doesn’t buy into a pre-made class identity?
I personally think that if the Tea Party movement is to succeed, it should acknowledge Fussell’s Class X and target it without mercy. They’re a cultural elite that doesn’t even try to become an economic elite - freeloaders and subversives all at once. To the wingnut, the class system ought to be as sacred as it is mobile: criticizing it, or attempting to opt out, ought to be near-treason to the American Way, where everything must be defined in terms of work, power, and money.
Thankfully, none of them seem smart enough to grasp this. Yet.
Fussell is anything but a fool – check out his Wikipedia page for his academic cred. Granted, Class is largely academic elitist snark, but he is a respected cultural historian, and his observations in that book have merit, once a little salt has been applied.
Fussell is an odd duck: literary scholar, tormented WW2 veteran, bohemian (sort of), social climber (by some accounts), and, on the whole, rather a snob. His “Class X” is a synthesis of his scorn for all manner of incurious conventional thinking: the aggressive ignorance of the lower classes, the complacent ignorance of the rich, the terrified conformism of the middle class, and the intellectual negligence of his fellow academics. He’s an avowed partisan of irony, skepticism, and contempt.
His thesis in Class is that the American middle class has largely disappeared, replaced by defeated white-collar proletarians on the one hand, and frantic social climbers one the other. This seems to be, in part, a lament about the general coarsening and “dumbing down” of American life – the former middle class is intellectually and spiritually closer to the blue-collar worker than to its own white-collar antecedents – and, in part, more of the same snark I’ve already described.
Fussell’s definition of “upper middle class” is designed to heighten both of these elements. I suspect that he really despised the preppies in his classes: children aping the upper-class pretensions of their parents and wasting the opportunities granted by their wealth and other advantages, especially attendance at a top-flight university. Defining this class so narrowly allowed Fussell to single them out for especial scorn.
A vast population of such people would be truly impossible; the class is defined by its exclusivity. A broader middle class, composed of what Fussell called “high proles,” is certainly possible, but Class was not written to answer that question, and is largely irrelevant to it. It’s significant, however, that a very large middle class is partly a product of definition, and I think that a definition of “middle class” that includes low- and middle-managers who merely earn decent salaries, but are otherwise culturally indistinguishable from their subordinates, would strike Fussell as spurious.
There are people who don’t even respect the idea of a “cultural historian,” people who insist that all a person needs to know in life are the numbers and maybe a few points of absolutist morality. Perhaps sb is one of them.
Assuming that more money were chasing the same amount of goods, yes. That’s why I made the point about importing labor - as long as the other countries stay the same, incomewise, compared to America’s newfound wealth, then we win and move up.
PS A side effect of that would be tremendous inflation.