Something about this exchange irks me, kinda sticks in my craw:
When they say “a lot of people are surprised” or “people would think”, which “people” are they talking about? Because obviously, by definition, if $50K is the median household income (checking Google, it’s actually $55K), then half the country is underneath that. Are *they *the ones surprised it’s not higher? Or, much more likely, is it people in these reporters’ orbit, who are making a lot more than that but think of themselves as “average”? Because personally, I’d be **psyched **if our family’s income was $55K a year, or even $50K.
(And furthermore, why are people “around the median” considered “working class”? Shouldn’t they be “middle class” by definition?)
Re: your final question - I assumed that middle class had more to do with income vs. cost of living, rather than the income median. That is, if $55K is the median income, but the median basic cost of living is $60K (I made that up, I have no idea what it really is) then those people are definitely not middle class.
Re: the rest of your post - I don’t disagree, like so many media outlets, NPR is its own kind of bubble, mostly liberal, well-educated and well-heeled. It’s almost the only radio I listen to; there are other media outlets that purport to have a more balanced presentation, but mostly that seems to me to be faked. I listen to NPR because there is a lot of news that is only covered there; also, it’s mostly outside the breathless 24-hour news cycle of the all news networks; and, commentary is clearly separated from news.
Or maybe people, for whatever reasons, define themselves as lower, middle, or upper class based on personal criteria, and that colors their view, leading to surprise when reality doesn’t match their preconceived notions.
When I was growing up, I thought we were middle class. After all, we lived in a house, not an apartment or trailer, and while we couldn’t afford a lot of things, we were fed and clothed and occasionally took short vacations or went out for ice cream. It wasn’t until many, many years later that I realized I grew up at the *waaaaaaaaaay *low end of middle class. And now, because my husband and I have had good careers, we’ve got a comfortable life, and I’m surprised at how little some families live on. We’re not rich by most measures, but we would have to give up a lot of nice extras we enjoy to live on what some of our relatives make.
Anyway, I also listen to NPR and I wouldn’t see such a comment as elitism. When you come right down to it, nothing is as important to us as *our *lives and it determines to a great extent how we view the lives of others. Good, bad, or indifferent, I think it’s just reality.
I don’t see the elitism. My household makes more than $50k a year and we’re still not sure how to pay for the older kid’s college and a single medical issue could easily wipe out our savings and put us in a pit of debt. So, sure, I would have guessed the median is higher because if we aren’t feeling secure, I can’t imagine how people on $50k are getting by.
You seem to think that people making over the median are surprised because they assume that everyone is sleeping on a mattress full of cash. More like “Well, shit… if I’m not doing it on MY income, what are they doing?”
“Middle class” is a virtually meaningless term that means whatever the speaker and listener want it to mean, even if they mean completely different things.
It’s possible that this is the speaker’s bias showing. He mostly knows rich people, and because everyone sort of assumes that their circle is a representative sample, and they make more than that, so they’re surprised that the median isn’t higher. But it could also be that all people simply have poor knowledge or understanding of income distribution.
Here’s a youtube video of a survey on knowledge about income inequality. Take a look at 1:10, where there’s a comparison between what Americans think the wealth distribution is compared to what it really is. It’s substantially wrong, and it’s wrong in the same way that your NPR quote says people are wrong about median income: people think that the middle class is wealthier than it is, and don’t realize how wealthy the richest few are.
Add to that fact that most people are functionally innumerate (how many people could define what a “median” is, or calculate it given a set of numbers?), and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if plenty of people who make less than the median are also confused about it, and think that it’s higher than it is.
Ok, now that I’ve written all this, I found this survey, which doesn’t support my hypothesis at all. It looks like most people do have a pretty decent idea of what the median income is, and while richer people think it’s higher, even relatively high income earners underestimate it. Which means that unless something has changed in the past few years, most people are actually surprised that the median income isn’t lower, not higher.
No, I think you’re misunderstanding me. But I do think it’s elitist for someone has two or three times my family’s income to think “I can’t imagine how someone could get by on that”. It’s treating the majority of the country as though we are living in some kind of unimaginable poverty (when in fact, by *worldwide *standards almost everyone in the U.S. is fairly well off). I mean, okay: our car (minivan) has almost 200K on the odometer, and the AC doesn’t work (and we live in hot, humid Missouri). We certainly can’t afford to go out to eat almost ever, or even buy “fancy” food at the supermarket.
And we can’t afford cable or satellite TV. But we have two pretty nice desktop computers, very fast broadband service, a decent HDTV with Netflix and Amazon Prime, three iPads, two smartphones, and some other assorted smaller tablets and such.
So it’s actually almost the opposite of what you are saying. What bugs me is this sort of pitying/amazed/appalled attitude “how can all these people be living on so little money?”
ETA:
Super interesting! One commonality: the post was spurred by a media elite (Ezra Klein, someone I read all the time) being surprised that only 20% of households had income higher than $88K (these are obviously old numbers). So he’s out of touch, but the common folk are more *in *touch. And that’s not so good for people who are reporting on, and analyzing, economic news.
I’m guessing that there’s some sort of intuitive notion going on that the median household income ought to also define the very middle of the middle class. But a household income of 50k, assuming said household is not just a single person, does not afford anything close to what a whole lot of people would consider “middle class”.
I don’t see the elitism either- I’m guessing there are probably more people looking up at the 50k median and thinking “We make 40k a year and shit sucks. Another 10k isn’t going to put me where I’d think “middle class” ought to be.” than there are people looking down from 100k+ household incomes thinking “The median is HALF what we make? How do they live on that?”
You didn’t mention two of the things that Jophiel mentioned… whether your kids are going to have to take out huge loans to go to college, how deeply in debt a medical emergency might put you, etc. If you factor in saving for those expenses, then even $100K or $150K can feel precarious. But it’s a good reality check to point out that $50K goes a long way in some locations when responsibly managed.
I heard that too and it didn’t seem elitist or even non-elitist to me, it simply seemed wrong. $50K is exactly what I’d expect people to expect, that is, unless they were assuming a 1-income household in which case I’d expect them to guess a bit lower. But maybe I was biased because I knew that it was around $50K.
NPR listeners, perhaps. Median income for NPR listeners is considerably above the median for the US in general (cite). People tend to take whatever they experience every day as “normal”. And sometimes are surprised to find that other people experience something different - like living on less than $85K a year.
A lot of times the “I don’t see how you could live on that little money” comments don’t take into account cost of living - it’s common on this board to overlook that cost of living and income vary hugely across the country. In the expensive parts near LA, SF, DC, NYC, Chicago, and a few others, $50k won’t get you far at all, you can’t even afford a decent home, much less amenities. But there are a lot of people with sub-$50k incomes who live in much cheaper parts of the country - it’s a lot different trying to afford a house that costs $70k in a rural area than a $700k house near a big city. (If you can come up with a basic 10% down payment for the $700k house, you can buy the $70k house outright and have zero mortgage for the rest of your life).
People often say this, but they overlook the fact that in some of those allegedly expensive metros, there are also many people with very low incomes. In 1996 and 1997, I lived in the NYC metro (Jersey City). I commuted every day to work in Manhattan, and I still distinctly remember reading a New York Times article on the PATH about how NYC and LA served as economic “pressure valves” to keep wages from going “too high” nationally. Apparently businesses would move operations to those cities if they were having too much trouble getting cheap labor in other parts of the country.
Not long after that, I discovered the truth of low-wage employment in Manhattan for myself. I had been working for 10 bucks an hour at a temp agency, not terrible money for that time. But then I lost that job (got drunk on New Year’s Eve and called in sick on New Year’s Day, so they told me to get lost), and I was stressing about how I was going to pay rent and so on. I had temped at a literary agency in Soho as a receptionist and made some friends there. One of them urged me to take the newly vacant messenger job at the agency, so I could stay in the area and not move back to Missouri (she was kinda sweet on me). I took her up on it, but soon discovered it was backbreaking work, and for only six bucks an hour (plus free subway tokens, although those were not much help). I quit after one day, and I wasn’t able to get out of bed the next day anyway.
But it just kind of blew my mind. This was not a part-time job for teenagers: it was full time and during business hours. This was a fancypants agency with well-known authors and political figures coming in and out (just during the brief time I temped there, I got to meet Bob Kerrey, then running the New School and a former senator, governor, and presidential candidate). But they thought nothing of paying six bucks an hour for a full-time position, and apparently were accustomed to being able to get workers at that rate.
And on the cost-of-living side of things, there weren’t many people in my neighborhood who spoke English, and the local supermarket smelled awful (due to the meat section), but it was actually quite cheap. It just wasn’t the type of area any of the professionals at the literary agency would have ever been willing to even walk around in, much less live in.
It has been my impression that in the middle and above ranges, large urban areas pay more than elsewhere. But at the bottom end they pay exactly the same. So, an accountant in Chicago, IL, will make more than an accountant in Shawneetown, IL. Whereas a minimum wage job in both places pays the same. It is striking how folks at the low end are able to make it in an expensive urban area.
Yeah, that shit annoys me too (similarly, when the media elites fret that the AMT is threatening the “middle class”). Oddly, when it came time to compromise with Bernie Sanders on free college, Hillary went to half that level: $125,000.
