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To me it's a simpler, binary question: You're either rely on your own labor for a living (in other words, you're N missed paychecks away from zero), or you don't rely on your own labor. Some people think if their number "N" is high enough they can call themselves "middle class" to distinguish themselves from poorer people, but it's a small distinction. At the end of the day, you either have to work for a living or you don't.

If you have to work for a living, your life is similar to everyone else who has to work for a living. Sure you may have more toys than others, but the things you think/worry about from day to day are similar.

If you are in the class that relies on their assets for a living, you think about entirely different things, and your world view and lifestyle are entirely different. If you ever get a chance to hang around people like this or talk with them, do it--it's eye opening. It's like having an alien encounter.

>If you have to work for a living, your life is similar to everyone else who has to work for a living. Sure you may have more toys than others, but the things you think/worry about from day to day are similar.

The things I worry about have very little in common with someone who's working a minimum wage job. Someone on minimum wage with a child probably needs food stamps to even feed their child reliably. I spend more on daycare for my child every month than most of the people working at the daycare probably even make. Very different worries.

Lower class people are worried about making rent, putting food on the table, and what happens if they lose their jobs. I'm not worried about any of those things except the last, and I'm not particularly worried and that.

We do not have the same worries.

It's true that I cannot live off my assets indefinitely, but it's inaccurate and misleading to pretend that my worries are the same worries that low wage workers have.

I think you're on the right track here. To me, the middle class is defined not by assets, but by having your survival and security reasonably assured -- to the point, as you say, that you don't have to spend all your time worrying about them. You have to work, but you have some free time and disposable income.

You are worried about the same things, just to different degrees. Both of you depend on selling your time and skills for a paycheck.

A hot dog vendor might make less than you do, but their income depends on leveraging their assets and selling a product. The hot dog vendor is middle class, you are working class. Income isn't really part of the equation.

Of course, that's the strict traditional definition of middle class. Maybe that has changed.

A person who can live off their assets is worried about the same things as well, just to a lesser degree. It's possible to have sufficient assets to live off only to see a market, or an industry, etc. collapse, leaving you with insufficient assets. If you're a billionaire, that's pretty unlikely, but if you're just on the other side of "upper class" it's entirely possible.

Upper class people are also by and large selling their time and skills. Some of them are sitting idly, but most of them are engaged in some sort of job, whether that's a high-ranking executive position, or managing their own companies, etc.

"Middle class" cannot simply mean "works for wages", because that includes the entire working class. "Middle class" is meaningless if it's not more specific.

Physical vs. mental labor (aka blue collar and service vs. white collar) is what distinguishes lower and middle class and creates the third category.

Lower class = your income relies on your physical labor

Middle class = your income relies on your mental labor

Upper class = your income relies on your capital and others' labor

There are probably some struggling postdocs and adjuncts out there who would take issue with this classification. Also, some very successful skilled laborers and artisans.

Which actually highlights the unstated cultural elements of class aside from income.

Is an Ivy educated woman working at an NGO for 30k the same class as a shift manager at Walmart making 30k? Is a postdoc at Stanford lower class than a factory worker whose income is triple a postdoc stipend?

I think this is a somewhat outdated view of classes, at least in our current 'Western' societies. I'm reminded of this article by the BBC that argues that there are seven classes, for example:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21953364

It strikes me a bit as the traditional division of 'left' and 'right' in politics that, at least according to multiple professors in my PolSci classes, is not really accurate. Yet it's (understandably) still a commonly used method of classifying politics.

It's not just physicality, it's skill as well. Consider the unskilled call centre operator - low-end service work that is in the same class as low-end physical work, but doesn't tax a muscle.

i would say there's a 4th class, a working entrepreneur who's basically "all of the above".

We're talking about social classes, not occupational categories though.

Would you say that an immigrant inner-city convenience store owner and a bootstrapped SaaS startup founder are the same social class? They're both working entrepreneurs...

The traditional term for this is 'petit bourgeois'.

> Some people think if their number "N" is high enough they can call themselves "middle class" to distinguish themselves from poorer people, but it's a small distinction

That isn't true. I work for a living but I also accumulate 5 figures of capital every year, do that for 20-25 years, and I don't have to work for a living anymore.

Working class folks don't really have that option.

> Sure you may have more toys than others, but the things you think/worry about from day to day are similar.

That is poor financial planning. If you are middle income, you should be saving money so you don't have to work for a living instead of buying more toys.

That is poor financial planning. If you are middle income, you should be saving money so you don't have to work for a living instead of buying more toys.

That is an entirely subjective personal preference. If your goal is to be able to retire early and live off your savings, go ahead. However, if your goal is to also live before you retire and you understand that the only value of money is in the things you value that you can obtain with it, you might make entirely different financial choices.

I could have saved a lot more than I have if my now-wife and I had chosen not to have the wedding we always dreamed of, but no amount of money in the future could replace the memories we have of that day. I could have saved a lot by not going to lessons with top teachers/coaches in my hobbies, but then I would not be as good at things I enjoy doing today, and I would not be able to reach new levels tomorrow. In the case of physical/competitive hobbies, there are some things I simply would never be able to do if I left them to later in life. I could have saved the money I spent on buying a nice new car, but that car has meant I could get to places and do things I would otherwise not have been able to, and again no amount of money can ever replace those experiences.

I am certainly not advocating frivolous spending on things that don't really matter to you, and I am certainly not advocating spending everything you have the day you get it. But the idea that saving everything you can instead of buying some things you value has never made sense to me. It only really makes a difference if you expect that you will one day need all of that money in order to pay for the essentials, and short of catastrophic bad luck it seems unlikely that anyone with the ability to set aside significant savings in the first place will ever be in that position.

don't take these self-important penny-pinchers you find on hn too seriously. their condescension stems from a fundamental insecurity of some sort that they're projecting onto others, it's hard to put a finger on but it's definitely there.

they don't know anyone's situation, they just know spending money on things you like is bad. it's like some kind of alternative religious orthodoxy. imagine if they had the same attitudes about the kind of books you read or the people you hang out with (aka how you spend your time, and time=money)

people should do whatever the hell they want to do with their own money, just like their own time.

If you feel saving $10k/year is "extreme and condescending" and saying that is what you should do with your life...

1) The retirement laws setup basically say that is what you should do which is why their limit is ~$23k/year.

2) Good luck retiring in the future saving less than $10k/year.

3) Literally every financial planner on the planet tells you to save 10-15% of your income which for a developer is going to work out to ~$10k.

> But the idea that saving everything you can instead of buying some things you value has never made sense to me. It only really makes a difference if you expect that you will one day need all of that money in order to pay for the essentials, and short of catastrophic bad luck it seems unlikely that anyone with the ability to set aside significant savings in the first place will ever be in that position.

I've seen catastrophic bad luck happen to enough people who thought it couldn't happen to them and then destroy their marriages/careers/etc pretty thoroughly that I just have no faith that is correct.

> That is an entirely subjective personal preference. If your goal is to be able to retire early and live off your savings, go ahead. However, if your goal is to also live before you retire and you understand that the only value of money is in the things you value that you can obtain with it, you might make entirely different financial choices.

The US savings rate is consistently in the 4-6% range with few outliers. You may want to consider I was assuming people would interpret my statement reasonably and that I was implying spending money instead of saving it when you were saving at an average rate was a bad idea.

And yes, 4-6% is too small if you want to sustain your standard of living in retirement as a middle income member of society.

"Toys" implies frivolity that doesn't involve something people feel are truly necessary to make themselves happy.

Given on HN we know most mid-level devs make ~$70-100k [adjusted for cost of living], saving 20% isn't some extreme world view [which is what it'd take to save 5 figures/year].

I think "middle class" is "working class (by your definition) but headed out". That is, you are middle class if you are working and making enough by doing so to start accumulating capital.

If you're working, and using your surplus to accumulate toys, you're just a wealthier version of lower class (also a not very wise one, in my opinion).

Is your have tons of disposable income and you blow it on toys, you aren't lower class. You're just really bad at managing your money.

It's absurd to try to define middle class by behavior rather than means. Someone making 100k/year is absolutely not lower class, regardless of whether they blow all their money on frivolous stuff.

And one very good reason not to conflate income and class is cost of living.

A family making 130k in any major metro area is far from upper class. It's upper class in small towns. I'd venture most people making 130k+ are not in any way upper class.

And a family making 40k isn't lower class in a lot of the country.

Yes. It's as if the authors were looking for a particular result. The lower bound for upper income family in a metro area cannot be so low.

Pew was quite precise with its language and used the phrase "middle income"; it was the press that was sloppy and said "middle class".

I've almost always seen class in America to be based on income. It seems useful to publish results that define class by income; it is commonly understood to be income; income may not have as much a correlation with power and quality of life as capital as you suggest, but i preaume that it is still large. Finally, the deciding reason to measure income class is the probable assumption that it is far easier and far more accurate to obtain estimates on the income of US citizens than on their net worth.

I think class is only a little bit about money and assets.

You can be very poor, but have middle class education, culture and tastes, and you can be very rich, but have working class culture and tastes.

If you mean wealth, then say wealth. If you're talking about 'class' instead, then you must mean something more than that, otherwise you wouldn't have used the word.

What I was referring to are economic classes -- which are about ones relation to the economy and manner of interaction, and closely related to (though not identical to) wealth -- you seem to be talking about subcultures which have a loose correlation with economic classes.

I think chrisseaton is making the distinction between "social class" and "economic class", which is pronounced in many countries, but in other countries (USA for instance), there's little distinction.

> This would roughly correspond with the traditional ideas of "class".

That's the thing though. The concept of social class in the US doesn't. So while I agree with you, there's nothing strange with the article.

"Social class in the United States is a controversial issue, having many competing definitions, models, and even disagreements over its very existence. Many Americans believe in a simple three-class model that includes the "rich", the "middle class", and the "poor". More complex models that have been proposed describe as many as a dozen class levels; while still others deny the very existence, in the European sense, of 'social class' in American society."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class_in_the_United_Sta...

The problem with inequality is the polarization, the haves and the have nots with no in between. That leads to a more brutal society where there is no ground for agreement.

Even adjusting for cost of living would be a good start to making this more useful.