“Middle-class” is an ubiquitous term in U.S. public policy debates. A strong middle class is seen as emblematic of a strong country. Middle-class is the American dream: a steady, dependable job, a car, a single-family home.
Stories of American decline are wrapped up with tales of the erosion of the middle class. When commentators opine about the current social situation in America, they often refer to a story about the shrinking middle class of the country, using phrases like “hollowing out” to describe its fate.
But what is “middle-class?” As a policy analyst, if I am looking to solve a problem, I first need to define the problem. Having an understanding of what defines living in the “middle class” can help us understand how true these stories people tell are and, if they are true, what we can do about them.
A common historical tale told about the middle class is that of the middle class as the “merchant class.” Feudal society was defined with a strict contrast between landowning nobles and the sharecropping laboring class. Merchants were in between: wealthy because of their engagement with markets, but lacking the stature and social position of land-owning nobles.
The term “middle class” originated in the 18th century, curiously focused not on current connotations of wealth and income, but on social status. In Britain, this phrase was applied to people who were somewhere between laborers and aristocrats, with the wealth of nobles but without the titles. The founding of the United States, a nation of landowners but without nobility, made this a natural identification for many of these new citizens.
The United States’s geographically bifurcated economic system in the 19th century led to a fraught definition of “middle class” alongside it. The term came into widespread use in the North by the middle of the 19th century, especially in cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Chicago. “Middle class” spoke to a number of dimensions: it was largely a protestant class making up professions such as shopkeepers, lawyers, ministers, small manufacturers, and white-collar workers. The term was utilized by members of these professions to distinguish that class of workers from poor, Catholic (especially Irish) immigrants and the “idle” wealthy elite.
The South was a different picture. The binary identification of landowner elite and slave left little room for a “middle class” and the term was not in widespread use.
The 20th century saw the growth of white-collar jobs, then the postwar period saw what many people would call the “Golden Age” of the middle class. The GI Bill made postsecondary education and homeownership attainable for the masses and a United States largely untouched by the ravages of war kicked into gear to rebuild the world economy, giving a steady supply of high-quality jobs to a range of Americans. It wasn’t until the 1970s that deindustrialization started to create what many today call the “hollowing out” of the middle class.
So we’ve had different definitions of “middle class” over time. From “merchant” to “not noble or sharecropper” to “hardworking moral small business owner” to “not immigrant or wealthy” to “white-collar worker” to “single-family home and a car,” it has meant many things over the years. But what does it mean to us today?
The most common way for researchers to define “middle class” today is to appeal to some sort of objective measure. The Brookings Institution has done some fantastic work on the range of different definitions used to define the middle class in the United States. In a 2018 study, Richard V. Reeves, Katherine Guyot, and Eleanor Krause define “middle class” using three definitions: cash, credentials, or culture.
“Cash” is a definition of the middle class that revolves around how much income a family has in a given year. Most definitions of middle class that revolve around cash place middle-class families above the poverty line but somewhere below the $150,000-250,000 mark. There also tends to be a bit of a gap between poverty line and the lower end of most cash definitions of middle-class, suggesting a “low-income” category that is above the federal poverty line but that falls short of most definitions of middle-class. A 2018 review of 12 definitions of the middle class by the same researchers found researchers set the low end of “middle class” at somewhere between $13,000 and $55,000 and the high end of “middle class” at somewhere between $69,000 and $230,000.
The second definition they talk about are “credentials.” This category generally encompasses two criteria: occupation and education. My colleague Michael Hartnett has done some work investigating these trends in Ohio, where he has found nurses, teachers, truck drivers, and administrative assistants dominate the middle income bands. Definitions of “middle class” around education credentials revolve around postsecondary education. People with some college, associates degrees, and bachelors degrees but without master’s, professional, or doctoral degrees tend to fall into the category of what we consider “middle class” in the United States today.
Finally, there is culture. This gets into the fuzzy space of definition, but may be closest to what we think of when we’re talking about the single-family home, car-owning, steady-job middle-class. We think of middle-class families as hard-working, trying to make their children’s lives better than their own, suburban, into sports, public-school-attending, politically-moderate, television-watching, “normal” Americans.
Which leads us to a particularly interesting definition of “middle class”: self-identification. One way to find out if someone is middle class is to simply ask them. Now this does not answer our question of whether other people would consider them middle class, but it is an important datapoint: how do people judge their own lives and lifestyle?
In general, I find the Pew Research Center definition of “middle-income households” to be the most useful definition of “middle class.” They define “middle-income households” as those with two-thirds to double that of the U.S. median household income after incomes have been adjusted for household size. With the wide range of data available on income, this allows us to analyze how issues impact middle-class households.
That being said, I think subjective measures deserve more attention. Ultimately, our goal is not just to get people into an income band, but also to “feel” like they are a part of the middle class, with all of its material and social benefits. By using subjective measures of middle class, just asking people if they are in the middle class, we can get a better idea of what it means to be middle class and how we can help more people achieve it.