[ClosureChain]

I liked this article, except for this part:

"...his home country, where the middle class is burgeoning but almost half the population still lives in poverty."

This is a naive claim, it may appear so because people here in Mexico (specially in urban areas) spend a lot on bars, restaurants, vacations, gadgets and even cars.

What the author oversees is that this same people have not enough savings in the bank to survive even a couple of months without a job, owe lots of money to the bank and are unable to acquire more relevant goods like a home.

What the author calls middle class are in fact poor people with lots of toys and lots of credit cards.

[true_religion]

It depends on how you want to define the middle class.

Some people define it via income characteristics. So a college graduate, with no house or car, can be middle class if they land a good job.

Some people define it via wealth, so a retiree with no income can be middle class if they own their own home, and have a decent amount of savings.

Some people use the 'classical' (ala Marx) definition, in which the middle class are the socio-economic group that can buy the labour of working class, but typically work along-side them. For example, a mom-and-pop shop would have middle class owners, and working class employees.

[ClosureChain]

Good point. Actually I think the strict definition of "middle class" should be simply the average in a certain country.

However, for a lot of people including myself, "middle class" means people who own at least a little bit of wealth in the form of savings, enough to be able to survive for six months or a year without a job while not needing to cut costs on anything.

This of course is not the reality for maybe 95% of Mexican Citizens who live in perpetual debt with the banks and would go completely bankrupt if they ever stop working for as little as one month or maybe two.

I live here and believe me, there is not such a thing as a "burgeoning middle class" in Mexico; in fact, such claims sound like the typical BS politicians try to sell to the people.

[true_religion]

> Good point. Actually I think the strict definition of "middle class" should be simply the average in a certain country.

That assumes a normal distribution of wealth. In an authoritarian aristocracy or another similar government structure, you'd see pareto distribution wherein the leadership has 99% of the wealth and the average person is sharing 1%.

Therein by the 'average', there is no middle class.

I think... economically, this is quite true: there is no middle class. Yet we still call people who look like the classical middle class of yesteryear, middle class: professionals, white-collar workers, freelancers, small business owners. It's more of a social class now, than an economic one.