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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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When the top 1% holds 15 times more wealth than the bottom 50% you can't just define middle class as "middle income." That's a child's understanding of class dynamics.
Middle class is literally that - the class between the working class and the ruling class. Managers, professionals, small business owners, etc. A middle income welder is still working class!
Nobody said there's a clear separation between "working class" and "middle class," and I think most people understand the upper end of the "working class" to be middle class or higher.
Middle class is, by definition, the people in the middle of the income scale. A middle income welder is middle class. There are managers below middle class (i.e. fast food managers probably make like $30-40k), and there are tradespeople who make more than middle class. Middle class is literally just the people who are between 67% and 200% of the median income.
The definition for "working class" is even more squishy, and it's loosely defined as people without a college education (iffy Wikipedia article, claims it contains 30-35% of the population). There's a lot of overlap with "lower middle class," and it's definitely not a "majority" by pretty much any "official" standard, though it's often the biggest group (i.e. it's a plurality). So you'll have some overlap with income-based classes since "working class" is generally education-based instead of income-based.
Here is the definition from the The American Heritage Dictionary:
Class is not just about income. It's about social hierarchy as well, and not bothering to capture that is really missing the point.
They actually don't. The annual mean wage of a restaurant food manager is $63,820.
That's an extremely vague definition, especially when "working class" and "upper class" are also very vague.
Here's the calculator Pew provides, along with its definition, and AFAIK that's what's used in articles like this that discuss the shrinking middle class.
There's no objective definition everyone agrees on, but I think Pew's is fair and makes things really objective and easy to track, and it seems a lot of news agencies use their definitions, so I will too.
Mean is not median, so this is lumping in regional managers and whatnot which skews it heavily upward. I'm talking about the shift managers at a single store, someone hired by a franchisee to handle day to day operations. They won't be there flipping burgers unless they're severely understaffed, so they're firmly in "manager" territory.
I use "median" when I talk about averages in terms of demographics, because that has the nice property of splitting a group into two of equal size.
Welcome to political science, where there aren't neeat and tidy financialized definitions of every word we use. I get our disconnect, though, you're hung up on numbers and I'm hung up on words and we're just talking past each other.
And that's why the numbers exist, no? So we have a common, objective common ground?
Something vague like "worker" can be interpreted however you choose to suit your argument. Are doctors and surgeons "workers"? They work with their hands. If we limit it to uneducated people, what about professional athletes drafted from high school? Maybe playing sports doesn't count. What about landscapers or general contractors, some can make hundreds of thousands if they service high end customers. Ok, maybe limit it to hourly employees, not small business owners. There are also lots of apprenticeship-based jobs that can pay six figs for highly proficient individuals.
It makes a lot more sense to just use income ranges for class segmentations instead of something vague that can be manipulated based on the discussion.
No, numbers exist to measure and count objective things. How much numerical comfort do people need or deserve? How much free time? How much happiness? Ridiculous
Yes, like "how many people are middle class vs working class?" or "how much does the typical person earn?"
Free time is something that can also be objectively measured, just look at psychological profiles of people who are burned out, depressed, etc vs those that are happy with their work-life balance. Take the standard deviation of that and time off should be above that.
Happiness isn't really an objective thing, but there are lots of factors that can be objectively measured, like correlation between income and self-reported happiness.
If we're talking about public policy, we need to be objective, we shouldn't just make policy based on feel.
This is quite telling.
First, you presuppose that we should work people right up until the limit of psychological stress. Find out how much is too much work and then make them work slightly less than that.
Then, you presuppose you can just prescribe a one size fits all solution. As if we all burn out at the same rate, as if every job has the same burnout rate, it's all very mechanical and neat.
Further, you presuppose that you can even objectively evaluate psychological profiles!
You even presuppose that free time is value neutral, so that the quality of free time is irrelevant and only quantity matters.
Basically, by only sticking to numbers, you failed to do the most basic thing: ask workers how much free time they would like. You don't care what they want. You think there's an objective answer that can be arrived at mathematically.
I didn't say that.
I said that's the minimum time off.
Again, I didn't say that.
I didn't suggest any solutions, I merely gave objective measures for the examples you gave. Those are useful at a high level for policy decisions and whatnot, though any kind of broad measure will break down at the individual level. We're not talking about individuals here, we're talking about politics.
Again, I didn't say that.
I said that psychological profiles can be used to draw statistical conclusions. Individual psychological profiles are inaccurate, but over a sufficiently large, random sample, they should average out to a useful metric for a given study.
Again, I didn't say that.
I'm talking about broad metrics across a population, not at an individual level. Individuals should negotiate something that works better for them. I personally value time off more than equivalent pay, while several of my coworkers feel the opposite way.
Sure, that's what a usual metric, especially if you compare current time off vs desired time off, along with the rest of the data (e.g. do people who burn out want more time off, or are they not using the time they have?).
When trying to solve systemic problems like depression, reduced productivity, or high turnover, more data is almost always better.
You did! You said "Take the standard deviation of that and time off should be above that." How am I supposed to read that as anything other than "look at what level of work causes burnout/depression/etc. and then give them enough time off above that"?
We must have had a miscommunication because, again, it sure sounded like you were proposing how much time off people should get i.e. "Take the standard deviation of that and time off should be above that."
So what do you do with people who fall outside the normal standard deviation? If someone needs more time off than average, what do you propose we do with them?
imo the usual metric is the market rate. You get as much time off as the market will allow.