Middle Class?
From PEW, Are you in the American middle class?
Many elements of everyday life such as a person's income, wealth, education, job status/prestige and where they live combine to form a rough picture of social class. There is not a universally accepted model for social class but income, wealth, education, location, prestige/power all can arguably play a part in determining class.
Using your knowledge of what the median American looks like, let's evaluate social class in America. Think about these guiding questions as we go along today:
- What are the different classes in the US?
- Is there a middle class, and if so, what is it?
The median American looks like this:
household income: ~ $80K
education: some college but no degree
location: small city ~ 1million peo (Fresno, Tulsa)
prestige
(Github, prestige.com): high blue collar (police officer) or low white collar (social worker)
Knowing the median is the middle American (50th percentile), what is your opinion about how large should the middle class be? That is, how much above the median and below the median should be considered the "middle class"? (For example, should it be 80-20, 75-25, 60-40, or something else? And then what would you consider the other classes? (There is no right answer here, just want to get you thinking.)
The peak of the middle class in the US was during the post WWII decades (1945-1975). Since then, the middle class has been changing - shrinking and becoming more of a struggle. Sociologists have attempted to define the middle in various ways.
Gilbert's Model
Sociologists have used different models of social class to explain how social class disaggregates in the United States. The table below is based on Hamilton College professor Dennis Gilbert's 1992 model of social class. Look at the table and notice how Gilbert uses multiple measures (job, income, education) to parse out the classes.
Joan Williams' Model
The "poor" class
Princeton University sociologist, Robert Wuthnow explains the dynamic that Joan Williams describes in his book The Left Behind; Decline and Rage in Rural America that location has strongly affected how rural Americans feel and how they vote.
Sociologists have used different models of social class to explain how social class disaggregates in the United States. The table below is based on Hamilton College professor Dennis Gilbert's 1992 model of social class. Look at the table and notice how Gilbert uses multiple measures (job, income, education) to parse out the classes.
1. Which class do you think your family is, based on Gilbert's model? Do all three components for your family fit his model?
2. What do you think about Gilbert's model? Any questions or criticisms?
Gilbert's model was created in the 1990s. Although the basic idea of the model is still useful, Joan Williams explains a more nuanced understanding of what "middle" should be - including understanding how this group thinks.
Joan Williams' ModelAnother model for the class structure is from Dr. Joan Williams who wrote the book White Working Class; Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.
Dr. Williams' book came out of an article she wrote about the 2016 election posted here in Harvard Business Review.
Her article and her model of social class focus on these groups:
The "poor" class
- the bottom 30%
- making less than 40K
- median income of $22K
- the middle 55%
- approx. $41K - $131K
- median of $75K
- the top 14% on earners and at least one college degree in household
- earns more than $131K per year
- median of $173,000
Dr. Williams explains that most Americans believe that they are middle class - whether they make $75K a year or $173K a year. But these households have very different lifestyles and values, as she explains:
You can read her article here or watch her Ted Talk below. The following TED Talk by Dr. Williams. It is about 15min long, but it is insightful.
Here is her Ted Talk:
3. After reading Williams' article posted here in Harvard Business Review or after watching the Ted Talk above, what do you think of her assessment of the contrast between the professional managerial elite class and the working class? Do you understand why she is saying that this results in a political divide?
If you want to watch additional videos or a shorter one or see additional resources, check these out:
- Here is a 2 minute explanation by the author on Youtube.
- Here is a 4 minute interview with the author on Fox News.
- And Williams started a project to address the education divide called Diploma Divide.
- (Extra) For more about her work, see these:
- Review from Harvard Magazine here.
- Review from Financial Times.
- Review from Medium here.
- Powerpoint slides here.
Other sociologists that support Joan Williams' thesis:
Pride and Prejudice in JD Vance Country; I spent years investigating the story of Vance’s ancestral region. It’s not what “Hillbilly Elegy” would have you believe, published in Mother Jones (2024), sociologist Arlie Hochschild explains,“And our place in the material economy is often linked to that in the pride economy. If we become poor, we have two problems. First, we are poor (a material matter), and second, we are made to feel ashamed of being poor (a matter of pride). If we lose our job, we are jobless (a material loss) and then ashamed of being jobless (an emotional loss). Many also feel shame at receiving government help to compensate that loss. If we live in a once-proud region that has fallen on hard times, we first suffer loss, then shame at the loss—and, as we shall see, often anger at the real or imagined shamers.”
“And our place in the material economy is often linked to that in the pride economy. If we become poor, we have two problems. First, we are poor (a material matter), and second, we are made to feel ashamed of being poor (a matter of pride). If we lose our job, we are jobless (a material loss) and then ashamed of being jobless (an emotional loss). Many also feel shame at receiving government help to compensate that loss. If we live in a once-proud region that has fallen on hard times, we first suffer loss, then shame at the loss—and, as we shall see, often anger at the real or imagined shamers.”
Robert Wuthnow's The Left Behind; Decline and Rage in Rural America
Here is a 2018 interview with Professor Wuthnow from Vox.
From Princeton U. Press:
What is fueling rural America’s outrage toward the federal government? Why did rural Americans vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump? And, beyond economic and demographic decline, is there a more nuanced explanation for the growing rural-urban divide? Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of interviews, Robert Wuthnow brings us into America’s small towns, farms, and rural communities to paint a rich portrait of the moral order — the interactions, loyalties, obligations, and identities—underpinning this critical segment of the nation. Wuthnow demonstrates that to truly understand rural Americans’ anger, their culture must be explored more fully. Wuthnow argues that rural America’s fury stems less from specific economic concerns than from the perception that Washington is distant from and yet threatening to the social fabric of small towns. Rural dwellers are especially troubled by Washington’s seeming lack of empathy for such small-town norms as personal responsibility, frugality, cooperation, and common sense. Wuthnow also shows that while these communities may not be as discriminatory as critics claim, racism and misogyny remain embedded in rural patterns of life.
Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in their Own Land
In her 2016 book, Strangers In Their Own Land; Anger and Mourning on the American Right, renown sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explains the deep story behind the Tea Party support and the rise of Trump which stems from growing social class inequality happening at the same time as civil rights equality which leaves many White Americans feeling like they are left behind by the government and that they are "strangers in their own land."
What I found most intriguing in her book was the concept of the "deep story", or a story that shapes the way people feel. It doesn't matter if the story is real or true or not. What matters is that the story is believed to be true so people shape their feelings and actions as if it were real. Dr. Hochschild's idea is explained on NPR's Hidden Brain,
In her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Hochschild tackles this paradox. She says that while people might vote against their economic needs, they're actually voting to serve their emotional needs. Hochschild says that both conservative and liberals have "deep stories" — about who they are, and what their values are. Deep stories don't need to be completely accurate, but they have to feel true. They're the stories we tell ourselves to capture our hopes, pride, disappointments, fears, and anxieties.
Katherine J. Cramer is author of The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she heads the Morgridge Center for Public Service. Her work focuses on the way people in the U.S. make sense of politics and their place in it. Cramer’s methodology is unusual and very direct. Instead of relying polls and survey data, she drops in on informal gatherings in rural areas—coffee shops, gas stations—and listens in on what people say to their neighbors and friends. It is a method that likely gets at psychological and social truths missed by pollsters. Summary from Scientific American is here.
Janesville, An American Story
The author explains that Janesville is "a microcosm of what was happening in many places in the country and with many kinds of work, because that’s what’s been happening out of the Great Recession. The unemployment level has fallen, but income levels have stayed quite depressed since before the Great Recession..."
New Yorker review here.
NPR review here.
Sociologist Jennifer Silva's We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America
In the run-up to the 2016 election, sociologist Jennifer Silva conducted more than 100 in-depth interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a struggling coal town in Pennsylvania. Many of the people she spoke with were nonvoters in 2016 and before. Their politics, she writes in her new book We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America, were often a hodgepodge of left and right. Their views could appear “incoherent or irrational” on the surface: Many of them trusted Donald Trump because of his wealth, for example, even as they supported higher taxes on the rich.
Many of the people Silva interviewed were profoundly cynical about social institutions, government, marriage, and family ties. They had often suffered trauma, such as domestic violence or military-related PTSD, and were in near-constant physical and/or psychological pain. Instead of placing their hope in systems that have failed them repeatedly, Silva finds, they worked to recast their own stories of pain into opportunities for individual self-improvement. Organized into groups of brief profiles from the town she anonymized as “Coal Brook, Pennsylvania,” the book is an unsparing and empathetic portrait of a diverse corner of blue-collar America.
Silva, a sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington, was raised in a working-class family in Massachusetts. Her father dropped out of high school to join the military, and she was the first in her family to get a bachelor’s degree. When we spoke on the phone last month, we talked about working-class white people’s affinity for Trump, the rise of conspiracy theories, Hillbilly Elegy, and the lessons that 2020 presidential candidates can take from her research. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Kohn and Lareau
- Upper middle-class families encourage negotiation and discussion and the questioning of authority and it can give the children a sense of entitlement.
- Working-class and lower-income families encourage the following and trusting of people in authority positions, and these parents do not structure their children's daily activities, but rather let the children play on their own. This method teaches the children to respect people in authority, and allows the children to become independent at a younger age.
Lareau explains these differences in her research. Her book, Unequal Childhoods is explained in the Atlantic here. And there is an excerpt available here.
Lareau identifies these two styles:
Concerted Cultivation: The parenting style, favored by middle-class families, in which parents encourage negotiation and discussion and the questioning of authority, and enroll their children in extensive organized activity participation. This style helps children in middle-class careers, teaches them to question people in authority, develops a large vocabulary, and makes them comfortable in discussions with people of authority. However, it gives the children a sense of entitlement.
Accomplishment of Natural Growth: The parenting style, favored by working-class and lower-class families, in which parents issue directives to their children rather than negotiations, encourage the following and trusting of people in authority positions, and do not structure their children's daily activities, but rather let the children play on their own. This method has benefits that prepare the children for a job in "working" class jobs, teaches the children to respect and take the advice of people in authority, and allows the children to become independent at a younger age.
Why do you think each social class shapes kids these ways? Brainstorm your own hypothesis here.
Analyze either your family or a family you know - which style do you think they are and why? Can you give a specific example?
