Middle class

Within sociology, the term middle class denotes the position within a nation’s class system located between the society’s elites (or upper class) and the lower class. The middle class, then, is one of several social classes identified by sociologists and the media, and although the differentiation between the upper, middle, and lower classes of a society may seem readily apparent, it is often difficult to accurately determine what constitutes membership in each of these classes and where one class ends and another begins. Sociologists and economists differ in the definitions of who and what constitutes the middle class in twenty-first century American society, as several important social and economic changes over the past fifty years have blurred the boundaries between classes, thus rendering them much less rigid than in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, the middle class is often still perceived as the bedrock of American society, and politicians often deliberately attempt to appeal to middle-class voters.

Background

Issues of social class have long been a topic of interest among social philosophers and sociologists, dating at least to the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the mid-nineteenth century. Marx, however, only identified two social classes—the bourgeoisie (the ruling class) and the proletariat (the workers)—in The Communist Manifesto and his other classic works, thereby oversimplifying analysis of class.

German sociologist Max Weber, who devoted much of his career to refining and expanding upon Marx’s ideas, argued that social class was much more nuanced and complex: in addition to the elite and lower classes, societies also consist of professional/managerial workers and small business owners who are stratified between the two extremes and would today be referred to as the middle class.

The making of the modern American middle class is an outgrowth of the social and economic reforms established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the New Deal of the 1930s, as well as the post–World War II economic boom that expanded the US economy and corresponded with massive suburbanization on the outskirts of the nation’s major cities throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The Federal Housing Authority provided low-interest home mortgage loans to returning veterans after World War II that fueled suburban growth, and a strong labor union movement throughout the mid-twentieth century (perhaps best exemplified by Detroit’s then thriving automobile industry) helped to ensure good wages to large numbers of working Americans who would then have disposable income to spend on leisure and luxury items.

The federal government also subsidized higher education for returning veterans through the GI Bill, thus enabling hundreds of thousands of soldiers to obtain a college degree and pursue a professional, white-collar career, a scenario nearly impossible to attain prior to the war when a college education was almost exclusively available to the upper class. Consequently, a new wave of professional and managerial workers with higher levels of education were earning higher salaries and were becoming a cornerstone of American social, political, and economic life beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. Since this time, candidates for public office at the local, state, and federal levels have targeted middle-class voters by often engaging in rhetoric that includes "preserving and protecting the middle class."

Impact

Despite the recent focus on the middle class by politicians, experts disagree over whom and what should be considered middle class given the significant socioeconomic shifts since the late 1970s. In the twenty-first century, the American middle class appeared to be in a state of flux, which has generated confusion and debate over the meaning of middle-class status. This debate is further compounded by the fact that neither the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) nor any other US government agency has an official, standard definition of what designates middle class. Some define the middle class in terms of annual household income, but because the cost of living varies so widely from state to state, it is extremely difficult to determine middle-class status on the basis of income alone.

Others have considered a member of the middle class as any individual who has a salaried career and is not paid an hourly wage. Similarly, some argue that due to massive deindustrialization in the United States since the 1970s and the relocation of American manufacturing plants overseas, middle-class status is determined by possessing an undergraduate degree. However, graduation from college no longer guarantees middle-class status or success and financial security as it might have been in previous generations. Compounding this is that college graduates in the early twenty-first century often incur tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt that impedes their ability to purchase a home or pursue other leisurely activities. In a 2013 poll that was reported by the New York Daily News, over 40 percent of Americans who graduated from college in 2011 and 2012 were underemployed and felt they needed additional schooling or training to advance in their careers, which would increase their debt and pose serious implications for the future of the American middle class. Nevertheless, a 2012 Pew Research Center poll found that 60 percent of respondents felt that their standard of living was better than that of their parents at the same age.

In December 2015, the Pew Research Center released a data analysis showing that the American middle class had shrunk considerably as a percentage of the population between 1971 and 2015, while both the upper and lower classes grew. In 2015, according to the Pew report, 120.8 million US adults, or 50 percent of the population, were living in middle-income households, compared to 80 million, or 61 percent of US adults, living in middle-income households in 1971. By industry, the largest increase in the percentage of lower-income people was in the construction, retail, and transportation sectors, while the largest increase in the percentage of upper-income people was in finance, insurance, and retail. In all of these industries, the number of middle-class employees has decreased by more than 10 percent since 1971. The share of aggregate income held by both middle- and lower-income households had also declined in this time period, while the upper class's share had increased by more than half. In addition, the median income of middle-class households was 4 percent less in 2014 than in 2000, while their median wealth fell by 28 percent between 2001 and 2013.

These figures held relatively steady over the subsequent decade. In 2024, the Pew Research Center reported that 51 percent of Americans lived in middle-class households in 2022. However, the share of aggregate income was revealed to have fallen almost every decade since 1970, with middle-class households accounting for 62 percent of the aggregate income of all US households in 1971 and the middle-class share of total US household income dropping to 43 percent in 2022. The report also revealed that several racial and ethnic groups were less likely to be part of the middle- and upper-income tiers in the US, including Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans. Studies also found that American families were less likely to live in middle-class neighborhoods in the 2020s, often pushed into lower- or higher-income areas due to new construction trends that have made previously middle-class neighborhoods unaffordable for many residents.

Bibliography

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Parlapiano, Alicia, Robert Gebeloff, and Shan Carter. "The Shrinking American Middle Class." New York Times, 26 Jan. 2015, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/25/upshot/shrinking-middle-class.html. Accessed 5 Jan. 2016.

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