And most social security recipients aren’t making a ton in capital gains.
The lack of capital gains in the numbers does really skew the investment class - but the investment class is pretty small.
And if we throw students at “degree-granting postsecondary institutions” into the mix, that’s an additional 1% of the population in 2014 vs 2000.
What is “the investment class”?
I don’t know the typical capital gains of social security recipients. But I do know that Pew is ignoring several significant demographic changes, ignoring compensation and income that I and others receive that increase my quality of life, and ignoring government taxes and transfers. Retirement income doesn’t show up fully in CPS ASEC (Czajka and Denmead 2008), although USCB is working to fix that.
So while Pew may be measuring something real, it’s hard to know how real and what it means. Boomers retiring, poor people moving to the US, more students going to college, and changes to my wage/nonwage employment compensation all say very little about how the average Joe is doing. Most working people and their families could be better off and we could still see a shrinking middle class as defined by Pew.
The investment class is those people who primarily make their money not through wages, but through capital gains and dividends. Those people don’t get counted well in a system that doesn’t count capital gains. They are also disproportionately retirees - who have little wage income, but have a lifetime of saved money to be making money off investments. But most retirees in the U.S. get their money through social security and have very little in capital gains.