‘Middle class’ start at $40,000, so who’s poor?
by Benjamin on April 26, 2010
Who the devil are the middle-class? Development people talk of the ‘rising middle class’, political theorists of the ‘middle-class voting blocks’, pundits of the increasingly discontent middle classes. But who are these people and am I middle class? Are you? Is that a bad thing? Going by Wikipedia there’s a number of different definitions, based on educational background, employment, income, or simply as those people who are not ‘upper class’ and not ‘working class’. The middle class is the Solow residual of society. Nice.
Avoiding all this, and playing with US census data on family income distribution, it can be done differently. Take the median and mean family income (turns out it’s $61,355 and $78,845), and with a bit of linear extrapolation you can work out the income that the ‘middle’ of the income distribution earn, or the 50% of the population who earn between the mean-median and those evenly distributed around it. (In the below graph, population as a percentage of total are at the top of the bars).
So what does that all mean? Well, the middle class, in terms of the ‘middle’ 50% of families, starts at approximately $40,000 p.a. It ends somewhere slightly above $100,000, and indeed there are more people below the middle class than there are above. So if you have a household income of $40,000 you are unofficially middle class. Approx 30% of the population live below the middle class threshold and 20ish percent are above. None of this is exact, and we don’t know what the top of the distribution looks like, but we can say that society is not exactly even. The U.S. Gini coefficient has been rising, and peaked (temporarily?) in 2006 at 47, standing at 46.6 in 2008. What the recession will bring I don’t know. The poverty threshold in the US for a four-person family is $22,050, which leaves a lot of people under the line, as indicated by this beautiful graphic. From light to dark it illustrates the Poverty rates from 5% (light pink) to >40% (darkest red).
Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
It seems to be getting darker and redder towards the middle and the bottom… Curious that.
Tags: income, Mean, Media, Middle Class, Poverty, USA
It’s remarkable how in harmony you are with factcheck.com’s vidcast
http://www.factcheck.org/2010/04/just-the-facts-2010-mailbag/
That’s really interesting, and I hadn’t seen that. Would say that the figures aren’t quite the same, but the thinking is definitely similar, and my calculations do seem to be in harmony, at least with the broad definitions of ‘middle class’.
Thanks for the link, and for those following it, the middle class discussion starts around the minute counters 2:40. I don’t think I agree with putting the middle class definition just above the poverty line. Thoughts?