[benreesman]

When I was young in the days of yore, “middle class” was something like “median household income”, maybe a bit more but not double, which got you a 30-year fixed in a part of town that was safe but not swanky, and was easily had by a worker with a college education or trade, or a hard worker, great saver, without.

“Upper middle class” was your doctors and lawyers, but the typical kind (the 100-week partner guy was fucking “RICH”). They had nice houses in desirable parts of town.

“Lower middle class” were workers without differentiated skills or educated folks with really bad money habits / some other issue like that. With my folks it was some college but dropped out to start a family (have me), got in tax trouble young. Lower middle class almost always rented forever.

“Poor” was like, no skills or flat lazy, or conspicuous drug problem, or something like that. They rented in bad parts of town. But rented.

That’s context or color, not numbers. But we were “the poor relations” relative to the spiffy college graduates or the folks with two incomes, and had IRS trouble, and rented in unglamorous but perfectly nice places.

Sounds crazy now.

[ryandrake]

I always thought all that numerous stratification into "upper middle class" and "lower middle class" and "upper lower middle class" and "lower middle upper middle class" and so on was kind of pointless and only serves to either 1. satisfy people who feel the need to precisely identify their own position on the totem pole or 2. pits people against each other who are actually in the same class and should be fighting together.

Most of us are N missed paychecks away from being broke. For some, that N is 1 or 2, for some it's 5, for retirees, the number may be even larger; but we all inevitably need money from our labor to come in in order to live. And this is true regardless of the dollar amount on that paycheck. We're all in the same boat.

For a very few lucky people, that N is infinite because their money grows faster than they can spend it. They get richer just by existing.

To me, these are really the only two meaningful economic classes. Do you have to work for your living or not?