Comment by dpark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dpark | Hacker News Reader

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>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.

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