Why is considered middle class

Skip Navigation. Jennifer Liu. Sign up now: Get smarter about your money and career with our weekly newsletter Don't miss: This mistake could drop your credit score by as much as 50 points—here's how to avoid it. Class is a complicated question. It involves more than just income. It involves the cost of living, lifestyle choices, and lived experience.

It consists of social and cultural capital. So, while the Pew income calculator may tell us where we stand, the experience of class is entirely relative. People deduce their class standing from the cues in their immediate surroundings—their neighborhood, their workplace, their social circles.

Most people tend to think of themselves as middle class. However, the truth is, the middle class includes people with vastly different lifestyles and concerns. People who belong to the lower sections of that quintile may not feel especially wealthy if those around them are far more affluent.

According to a report from the Pew Research Center, slightly more than half of the U. Both poorer and richer income classes have increased in size in recent decades.

Since , the number of the lowest-income earners, who make less than two-thirds of the U. One way is simply to look at the range of incomes considered middle class. The Pew Research Center defines the middle class as households that earn between two-thirds and double the median U.

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Investors Business Daily also added the stock to its watchlist. Riot Blockchain closed up 8. Riot Blockchain Daily Chart Analysis The stock has been pushing higher and now has reached resistance in what technical traders call an ascending triangle pattern. If the lower and upper middle-class people are reclassified into the lower and upper classes, respectively, as Pew researchers did in , that yields a much more sensible assessment. As shown in Figure 1, with that adjustment, just shy of 50 percent of the population would be truly middle-class.

Notably, Black and Latinx respondents were far less likely than white respondents to identify themselves as belonging to the middle and upper classes, a topic that deserves further attention. Source: Pew Social and Demographic Trends, Numbers might not add to because of rounding. The second common way of defining who is middle-class divides the population , typically into quintiles, and examines the share of the nation's total income taken home by the middle group in our case, the second, third, and fourth quintiles.

Census data Figure 2 reveals how much income—including investment income and earnings—the middle 60 percent took home over time. From through , it exceeded one-half of the country's income.

By , that share had fallen to 45 percent. One problem with this approach is that it always measures the same share of the population.

So it can determine if these middle earners are getting richer or poorer, but not whether the middle class is shrinking or growing. When baby boomers were in their 20s, 59 percent of them lived in middle-class households.

By the time millennials were in their 20s, only 53 percent did. Futher, demographics obscure even larger declines in the welfare of the middle class. Earnings generally increase as workers age, peaking soon after age By , the U. In contrast, today's labor force is, on average, much older, leading us to expect the typical worker to have attained a higher wage. Instead, even while baby boomers were at their peak earning stage, middle-class incomes fell overall.