Middle Class in America

Abstract

This article presents an overview of the middle class in the United States. Although the American middle class does not conform easily to the models (particularly Marxist class consciousness) that are more evident in other nations, some clear trends can be identified. For example, the divergent voting patterns of the lower-middle class and the upper-middle class are fairly easy to describe, even if those patterns are not consistent over time. There is some evidence that radicalism (or "frustration politics") has resulted from the perceived decline of the middle class, but much of this apparent radicalism appears to assume irregular or volatile patterns in voting rather than actual extremist, fanatical, or fundamentalist tendencies. The collective economic fortunes of the middle class took a noticeable turn for the worse in the 1970s, the Early 2000s Recession, and during the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

Keywords Class Consciousness; Consumption; Cultural Capital; Economic Capital; Overconformity; Radicalism; Social Norms; Stratification

Stratification & Class in the U.S. > The Middle Class in America

Overview

The observation that the generation of middle-class households is the first generation in American history to experience a lower standard of living than their parents has become very common. Although the descendants of the "baby boom" generation have generally enjoyed a higher level of educational achievement than their parents, they have also faced higher inflation-adjusted living expenses and often engage in a higher level of consumption (spending) than the earlier generation. According to Lehmann-Haupt (1993), family inheritance, rather than accomplishment, became more likely to provide the primary source of economic opportunity in many middle-class households.

One of the reasons that the Greatest Generation of middle-class households, the single providers of which were often employed in the manufacturing sector, was economically secure was that it enjoyed substantial appreciation in the value of its homes. Many of those homes were purchased in the post–World War II era with low-interest mortgages provided through the G.I. Bill or other government programs. The baby-boom generation of middle-income households appears to have reacted to the relative decline in its standard of living primarily through long-term anxiety about the future and that of its children rather than through anger or political activism (Noble, 1993; Reich, 1994). Political radicalism and frustration politics (or "protest voting") flourished in the 1970s but have arguably declined in the decades thereafter.

Middle-Class Income

The middle class may be defined as "those earning between two-thirds and twice the median American household income" (McNair, 2023). By this measure, the proportion of the population that is middle class fell from 28 percent to 22 percent between 1970 and 2000 (Roberts, 2006). Middle-income households saw their hourly wages rise only 6 percent between 1979 and 2013, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2021 median household income was $70,784, meaning American households who earn between $47,189 and $141,568 are considered middle-class (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022). Financial classifications, however, are highly relative, and often depend on geography. For example, the median household income in Miami is much lower than the median household income in San Francisco. Nonetheless, 73 percent of the population claimed to be middle- or working-class in a 2022 Gallup survey (Walrack, 2023). Another 14 percent of Americans identified themselves as upper-middle class.

Middle-Class Values & Concerns

It can be useful to characterize the middle class in terms of values and social concerns or status. These values and concerns, however, are often discussed—particularly among the lower-middle class—as negative factors such as isolation, voter apathy, or economic insecurity.

C. Wright Mills's influential 1951 book White Collar: The American Middle Classes predicted several trends that remain prominent. Mills observed, for example, that the working class and the professional class associate culturally with the middle class in both social and political terms. In other words, the non-middle classes often express their views in non-class-related terms (Gerteis, 1998).

The lower-middle class tends not to exhibit strong ideological or political affiliation. As such, the lower-middle class, in particular, is frequently a crucial demographic group in federal elections; political campaigns tend to appeal to them (Gerteis, 1998). Somewhat ironically, the middle class is often associated with voter apathy. Mills termed the administrative middle-class "strangers to politics . . . Not radical, not liberal, not conservative, not reactionary" (Mills, 1956 [1951], p. 328). This characterization can also be at least partially extended to Mills's view of the social life of the middle class. Kelfalas (2007) argues that the lower-middle class is more self-conscious about respectability than either the working class or the upper-middle class.

A defining social characteristic of the middle classes has speculatively been defined as "a longing for control" associated with the desire for social and economic security. A slight variation on this characterization for the lower-middle class has been termed "keeping up appearances," accompanied by some cynicism about the possibility of upward social mobility. Very broadly, this group tends to be negatively ambivalent about welfare recipients, the federal government, intellectuals, and foreign-born U.S. residents (Kelfalas, 2007, p. 65). Also very broadly, the non-professional middle class are likely to think of themselves as politically conservative; they are also usually charitable and socially generous unless threatened by the loss of social or economic security (Kelfalas, 2007, p. 66).

Heckert and Heckert (2004) posit that the ten most common middle-class behavioral norms are:

• Privacy,
• Group loyalty,
• Conventionality,
• Prudence,
• Participation,
• Responsibility,
• Moderation,
• Peacefulness,
• Honesty, and
• Courtesy.

At least five of these traits—group loyalty, participation, responsibility, conventionality, and courtesy—can arguably be grouped together under the rubric of conformity. Similarly, noted that the norms and values of the American middle class differed significantly from those who are less privileged. Some traits include "individualism, independent self-representation, analytic cognitive style, and self-focused emotions" (Huynh & Grossmann, 2018, p. 9)

Heckert and Heckert (2004) describe how these traits can either be perceived positively or negatively. A workaholic, for example, may be viewed with disdain by coworkers but as exceptional by a supervisor; a gifted student may be resented by fellow students but appreciated by a teacher. In this context, provincialism (or even more disparagingly, parochialism—an excessively local or narrow outlook) can be regarded as negatively perceived overconformity to the value of conventionality and group loyalty. These ten social norms can also be subdivided into real (or commonly achievable) social roles and ideal (or "sublime" or exceptional) social roles, but these ten values are primarily relevant in their real or achievable form in this discussion (Heckert & Heckert, 2004).

Further Insights

Happiness

Middle-class income's impact on happiness is an ongoing debate among scholars. Among the most influential of these studies is Princeton University’s Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton's 2010 research that concluded a plateau in happiness occurred after an individual's income reached an annual $75,000. Translating this finding into a 2022 comparable income, the plateau would occur at $97,000, a number which falls within middle-class income. Conversely, Matthew Killingsworth of the University of Pennsylvania's 2021 study found that this plateau did not exist, and happiness increases as income grows. Regardless of the stance, it is without debate that middle-class income individuals who are typically able to afford reasonable healthcare, quality food, and work reasonable hours, are generally happier than individuals who struggle with access to such necessities (McNair, 2023).

Self-reported happiness might seem like an unreliable measure of societal health. Frank, however, argues that self-reported happiness (or "subjective well-being") is indeed a reliable indicator of more than one measure of social health: "Happy people agree strongly that 'When I am doing well at something, I love to keep at it,' whereas unhappy people often seem not even to understand what such statements are getting at" (2013, p. 17). Self-reported happiness, or unhappiness, also tends to be consistent over a period of several months or longer, and happiness correlates strongly with minimal absence from work and minimal workplace conflict (Frank, 2013, p. 16, 19).

Politics

A survey of political culture in the 1990s, Hunter and Bowman's The State of Disunion found that the working poor and the lower-middle class—especially African Americans—were significantly more supportive of "identity politics" based on small group differences, particularly those based on ethnicity, than professionals and the affluent. The wealthy were also found to be substantially more likely to express distrust of the federal government than the middle classes. About 75 percent of those surveyed were at least "pleased" with their jobs, and more than 90 percent indicated that their childhood and current family life were mostly happy or better (Steinfels, 1996). These categories—arguably including happiness—tend to coalesce in studies of changing middle-class voting patterns during late twentieth-century recessions.

Gerteis (1998) attempts to find a functional approach to describing class roles or class consciousness in the U.S. using surveys about self-reported political and ideological loyalty. A possible avenue emphasizes social status as opposed to material self-interest. Gerteis argues that this approach accounts for voting patterns during the political and economic crises of the early 1970s, but that the recession of the early 1990s is not as easily explained. The surveys from both periods indicate that professionals claimed to be strongly "engaged": they identified themselves firmly as liberals or conservatives and with either Democrats or Republicans. Lower-middle-class workers, however, consistently identified themselves as neutral both in terms of ideological and party loyalty.

In this model, intellectuals—including the clergy, academics, researchers, social workers, and professionals in cultural fields—are generally left-leaning and derive self-worth from cultural capital, including prestigious possessions and credentials that can potentially be used for exclusionary purposes. Engineers, managers, and corporate executives that tend to be right-leaning derive self-worth from economic capital or straightforward wealth. These differences can be easily mapped onto a political landscape. The lower-middle class—including salespeople, accountants, clerks, and teachers—tend to be centrists and devoid of the influences of either cultural capital or economic capital (Gerteis, 1998).

The Marxist class consciousness model appeared to grow less relevant between the 1970s and the 1990s. Levels of self-interest or unified occupational solidarity appeared to become less identifiable with voting behavior over time. This confusing situation can be partially explained by an analogous condition on the political left in the 1960s: the counterculture movement was generally anti-government at the same time that federal Democrats were expanding civil rights and funding on social programs. Gerteis (1998) concludes that voting patterns in the 1990s had moved even further away from a unified class consciousness model in which group solidarity is evident, through what is termed "segmentation," in which occupational or social groups exhibit some similar voting trends, and into a period of "fragmentation" in which even that trend is not clear. Gerteis's analysis, however, does not explicitly link growing "fragmentation" with escalating voter radicalism.

Middle-Class Radicalism or Voter Volatility?

Both internal and external factors combined after the early 1970s to contribute to the potential radicalization of the middle classes and what has been termed "frustration politics." In the 1970s, the Watergate scandal, the OPEC oil crisis, and a recession combined to grant some perceived national credibility—or popularity—to the radical populist George Wallace, who presented a platform based on Southern economic and cultural dissatisfaction. Wallace's speeches asserted that both African Americans and the affluent had gained too much political influence. He also termed his supporters "Middle American Radicals." Patrick Caddell, a prominent Democratic pollster, found that public willingness to support Wallace for president in the early 1970s was as high as 35 percent, half of which identified their potential support as a protest vote against the established parties. Caddell's interpretation of this alarming trend was that the:

He also termed the trend "[c]enter extremism."

The term "radicalism" is largely used pejoratively to describe voter volatility or dissatisfaction, but the well-known poverty activist Barbara Ehrenreich implicitly claims that it also has another meaning. She argues that labor protests in the 1970s and the counterculture opposition to the Vietnam War were consistent with the American tradition of activism, but some intellectuals were uncomfortable with the idea of politically active working- or lower-middle class groups and ascribed that behavior to a recent, divergent culture of "permissiveness" (Morley, 1989).

The October 1987 stock market plunge and a subsequent recession marked a less severe continuation of this trend. In the 1980s, the Republicans, in effect, favored "soaking the middle": the professional class was taxed at a higher rate while rich individuals and corporations received tax breaks (Gerteis, 1998). White-collar unemployment grew steadily between 1983 and 1993, from about 5.5 percent to over 8 percent, as blue-collar unemployment fell from 10 to 8 percent. In the 1980s, the federal government also took the unprecedented step of protecting the banking and finance sectors, and "business magazines spoke of the first white-collar recession" after 1990 (Phillips, 2002, p. 97).

The populist agenda resurged, and what is known as the "swing vote"—including "Reagan Democrats"—was estimated to be as high as 70 percent of voters. The right-wing populists Patrick Buchanan and Ross Perot campaigned on a defense of working-class and middle-class interests. Voter turnout was about 55 percent in 1992, whereas in 1998 and 1996 it was 50 percent. Perot, the successful third-party candidate, garnered 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992; George H. W. Bush had received 53.6 percent in 1988, and in 1992, Republican Robert Dole received 37.7 percent. Perot's success clearly aided the Democratic victory. In 2000, however, the left-wing populist Ralph Nader used a similar platform to garner 3 percent of the vote that otherwise would have primarily benefited Democrats. Polls after the election revealed that public support was as high as 8 percent for Nader, and "post election behavior [is] usually reflective of underlying sympathies" (Phillips, 2002, p. 97-98, 384-388).

If Caddell's "center extremism" was an accurate description of voter behavior in the 1990s, the later period certainly did not result in a radical change. The Republican Party, however, has since assumed a more fundamentalist and socially conservative stance, which resonates more with the working class than the business elite—traditionally the key Republican base (Gerteis, 1998).

Income Instability After the 1970s

Both income inequality and income instability have risen since the 1970s, but the issue of income stability may have more to do with perception and the loss of high-quality jobs. A study by the Congressional Budget Office using comprehensive Social Security Administration records concludes that levels of income were relatively stable in the 1980s and 1990s. The public perception of income instability and greater economic volatility may be due to the fact that contemporary layoffs occur en masse and are widely reported in the media. On a smaller but more frequent scale, layoffs had been relatively normal when much more of the lower-middle class was employed in the manufacturing sector before the 1970s (Leonhardt, 2007).

It is true, however, that college-educated workers are more likely to be laid off than laborers, but the college-educated have also formed a larger part of the workforce since the 1980s. It is also true that temporary jobs are more common now, and that job tenure is declining. Income inequality, however, clearly has grown substantially since the 1970s (Leonhardt, 2007).

Greater income inequality (larger proportions of both poverty and affluence) tends to undermine democratic stability (Gutmann, 2006). The stability that has emerged since the 1970s, therefore, appears to be of a rather undesirable sort. In 2003, 25 percent of workers suffered an income loss of 20 percent or more, while 22 percent experienced an increase in income of 25 percent or more (Leonhardt, 2007). Between 1968 and 1980, about 6 percent of the population moved upward from the middle class, and roughly the same portion fell downward out of the middle class. Families with children, however, are statistically more likely to experience bankruptcy than divorce. Over 800,000 people filed for bankruptcy in the first three quarters of 2015, according to U.S. Courts, but by the 2020s, these numbers decreased significantly. In 2020, 544,463 bankruptcy filings were reported, and by 2022, 387,721 were filed (U.S. Courts, 2023).

Although middle-class anxiety exists about the prospect of losing ground financially, they do not appear to be bothered by not getting ahead. The middle classes apparently enjoy consuming cultural products such as magazines and television programs featuring luxurious homes. Frank (2013), however, argues that they might be pressured to overextend themselves financially for a valid reason. The quality of public schools is linked to local levels of property taxation; therefore, middle-class families with school-aged children might be compelled to spend more than they can afford on housing to gain access to higher-quality public education (Frank, 2013, pp. 43-44). Tax policies continue to place a heavy burden on the middle class, but state and federal politicians have actively sought to temper these policies in other areas (Leonhardt, 2007).

Demographic Shifts

Although the oft-reported "decline" of the middle class seems to reflect income more than a proportion of the population, a distinct trend of demographic stratification has emerged. San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, and Boston all rank low on affordability, and thus have the lowest proportion of middle-income households in the nation among large metropolitan cities. Levels of high- and low-income housing are rising, and rich and poor neighborhoods have become more homogeneous since 1970. Baltimore, Chicago, and Philadelphia have been marked by a very high rate of change along these lines. The national proportion of middle-income housing fell from 58 percent to 41 percent of metropolitan neighborhoods (Roberts, 2006). And in many cities rent has risen beyond the affordability of the middle class—more than half of Americans pay more than 30 percent of their income on housing (Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 2015). This trend means that firefighters and police officers often cannot afford to live in the area in which they work and, therefore, must commute. It is likely that those public servants perform better when they are more familiar with the area in which they work and when they have a personal investment in the location (Scott, 2006).

From 1971 to 2021, individuals over the age of 65, married individuals, and Black adults saw the most change in income overall, but White adults were the only group, as of 2021, in which half of the individuals lived in middle-income households. However, this was a decline from 1971's 63 percent. Black adults were the only social group whose percentage of individuals in the middle class did not decrease between 1971 and 2021, which stood at around 47 percent. Older Americans' percentage in the middle class rose from 39 percent to 47 percent, though they remained disproportionately in the low-income category (Kochhar & Sechopoulous, 2022).

Viewpoints

Middle-Class Women

Whereas an earlier generation of feminist activists struggled to release women from the near-requirement that they sacrifice career opportunities to raise children, it has become more common for women to lose the opportunity to raise children in their own home due to the financial need for a full-time income (Toner, 1993).

Women have often been more successful in fields in which cultural capital is more easily obtained than financial capital, such as academia and social work. There is some evidence that the level of cultural capital that such fields are perceived as conferring has declined as more women have excelled in them (Gerteis, 1998). The appearance of the decline of the middle class might be partially accounted for by the fact that high-earning men and women tend to marry one another and thereby rise out of middle-class status more readily. In all developed nations, however, fairly drastic changes in the gender-based makeup of domestic households have had virtually no effect on the proportion of the middle class in comparison with other economic groups (Pressman, 2007).

In 2021, unmarried women were more likely to be middle or lower income than unmarried men, who were more likely to earn more. Women's income increased significantly overall in the twenty-first century, changing the dynamic of middle-income households (Kochhar & Sechopoulous, 2022).

Is the Middle Class in Decline?

The apparent decline of the middle class in the United States has been compared with the more decisive decline of the bourgeoisie in late eighteenth-century Holland and late nineteenth-century England. The probable upsurge of radicalism in recent decades is at least partially analogous to the late eighteenth-century Dutch "reactionary revitalization" known as the Patriot movement, which distrusted aristocrats, plutocrats, and the "unruly poor" and favored industry and hard work over financing practices. It has also been compared with late nineteenth-century British "John Bull nationalism" and the imperialist exercises in the Boer War that resulted in a resounding 1900 Conservative election victory (Phillips, 2002, p. 382). The similarities of these three eras include a high trade deficit, social stratification, and "financialization" (government debt and high foreign investment in the domestic market). The dissimilarity is that both Holland and Britain were small nations dependent on nautical power, whereas the United States has ample natural resources and a large domestic economic market (Lehmann-Haupt, 1993). Across five decades, data indicates that the American middle class contracted between 1971 and 2021 from 61 percent to 50 percent. As this slow, but consistent, decline occurred, a similar increase occurred among upper-income individuals, from 14 percent to 21 percent, and the number of low-income households increased from 25 to 29 percent (Kochhar & Sechopoulous, 2022).

Terms & Concepts

Class Consciousness: In this context, class consciousness refers to the degree to which members of an identifiable social group are aware of their societal role and act upon that role. In a strictly Marxist sense, class consciousness can be contrasted with "false consciousness," which refers to societal messages that do not conform to rational self-interest from a worker's perspective. Current class-based social roles tend to be fairly clear in Germany, whereas in the United States, they are less easily defined. Alternate modes of class consciousness that can be applied to contemporary U.S. social roles include occupational interests and "universal" interests such as environmentalism.

Cultural Capital: Cultural capital can denote tangible acquisitions (such as wealth and possessions) or intangible properties (such as prestige) from which a sense of self-worth, self-identification, or society is derived.

Economic Capital: Economic capital, a more straightforward notion than cultural capital, denotes self-worth or self-identification, or social status based on wealth.

Overconformity: In this context, both nonconformity and "overconformity" can either be viewed positively or negatively. For example, positively viewed nonconformity, or "deviance admiration," denotes nonconformity that is admired. An example is a criminal who receives icon status despite the absence of any redeeming quality to their criminal activity. Heavy drinkers and nondrinkers might similarly—and ironically—be viewed as not conforming to normal standards of moderation and thereby exhibit "negative deviance." Mother Teresa or war heroes, by contrast, can be ascribed positively evaluated overconformity or "positive deviance": they sacrifice personal comfort and thereby bolster group loyalty.

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