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Half the World Is Now Middle Class Or Wealthier, Says Brookings Institution (brookings.edu)
schwit1 shares a report from the Brookings Institution: Something of enormous global significance is happening almost without notice. For the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty. By our calculations, as of this month, just over 50 percent of the world's population, or some 3.8 billion people, live in households with enough discretionary expenditure to be considered "middle class" or "rich." About the same number of people are living in households that are poor or vulnerable to poverty. So September 2018 marks a global tipping point. After this, for the first time ever, the poor and vulnerable will no longer be a majority in the world. Barring some unfortunate global economic setback, this marks the start of a new era of a middle-class majority.
In most countries, there is a clear relationship between the fate of the middle class and the happiness of the population. According to the Gallup World Poll, new entrants into the middle class are noticeably happier than those stuck in poverty or in vulnerable households. Conversely, individuals in countries where the middle class is shrinking report greater degrees of personal stress. The middle class also puts pressure on governments to perform better. They look to their governments to provide affordable housing, education, and universal health care. They rely on public safety nets to help them in sickness, unemployment or old age. But they resist efforts of governments to impose taxes to pay the bills. This complicates the politics of middle-class societies, so they range from autocratic to liberal democracies. Many advanced and middle-income countries today are struggling to find a set of politics that can satisfy a broad middle-class majority. The tipping point in the world today offers opportunities for business but complications for policymakers.
In most countries, there is a clear relationship between the fate of the middle class and the happiness of the population. According to the Gallup World Poll, new entrants into the middle class are noticeably happier than those stuck in poverty or in vulnerable households. Conversely, individuals in countries where the middle class is shrinking report greater degrees of personal stress. The middle class also puts pressure on governments to perform better. They look to their governments to provide affordable housing, education, and universal health care. They rely on public safety nets to help them in sickness, unemployment or old age. But they resist efforts of governments to impose taxes to pay the bills. This complicates the politics of middle-class societies, so they range from autocratic to liberal democracies. Many advanced and middle-income countries today are struggling to find a set of politics that can satisfy a broad middle-class majority. The tipping point in the world today offers opportunities for business but complications for policymakers.
At least 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That's not middle class and it's certainly not "no longer at risk of poverty".
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Be happy with the breadcrumbs the multinational corporations and the 1% throws at you. Now get back to work.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
so that boils down to "50% of people earns more than average"?
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Not only infinitely differentiable—and smooth, smooth, smooth like a baby's bottom—but also infinitely and indefinitely monotonic in instantaneous prospect.
And to think that another perspective is that the whole fragile edifice hangs by the thread of one stupid trade war.
Or a pandemic.
Or a rising tide.
Also that average is strongly skewed upward due to a very small minority of people in the US being obscenely rich. If you'd perform some statistical cleanup of those outliers, you'd probably get closer to an average US income of ordinary citizens of around 44k.
That's not a snarky question. That's the whole crux of the debate.
Do you define "middle class" as: ... having X amount of assets? ... being able to buy X luxuries? ... having a salary of at least X? ... being X sigma from the mean?
How you answer that question changes your perception of the growth of the middle class?
Definition of "middle class" used by researchers is ability to spend at least 11$ per day per person.
Such a narrow perspective in so many answers. Turn on your brain, people !
Living in the 1st and living in the 2nd or 3rd world makes for a dramatic difference these days. Real wages in the west have stagnated or gone down for two decades now. But for the poor of the world - China alone is lifting 10 million people out of poverty every year. People in Africa who 20 years ago didn't know where their next bowl of food will come from now have smartphones.
If you are among the very poor of the world, the last decades were a good time, in general.
Our personal perspective in the USA and in Europe is quite different. We are witnessing the ongoing largest theft in human history, called the financial crisis, and we watch the rich getting richer and us getting poorer.
But on a global scale, we are just 1.5 billion, give or take a few. Everyone else becoming less poor statistically overcompensates for our misery.
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The median income of a population is a robust way to define the middle class. So by definition 50% of people earn more, 50% earn less at all time, in all countries. Money devaluation does not change the median. Adding a few billionaires to the population doesn't change much the result.
In contrast the arithmetic average is strongly sensitive to income inequalities, since a few additional billionaires can shift the average a lot.
that's affordable without debt even on $12 bucks an hour. That SUV is used and built on a truck platform. It may guzzle gas but it's cheaper design makes it much more reliable. When you buy a vehicle even poor folks consider total ROI (though most wouldn't know it's called ROI).
If that's all the discretionary spending you can come up with you're not trying hard enough. I mean, if you're gonna shame the poor why not go all out and mention steak, lobster and Cadillacs. Oh, and don't go looking into studies that show the pressures from poverty affect decision making or how worrying about money and food non-stop lead to mistakes. Just keep drinking deep from the well of prosperity gospel.
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The typical âoepoorâ American lives in an air-conditioned house or apartment and has cable TV, a car, multiple color TVs, a DVD player, and a VCR among other conveniences.
Ooh, a VCR! It's the wealth of the 80s! You know VCRs are now toys for hipster millenials, right? They find the format amusing. I gave my VHS collection (including player) to one specifically because of this.
Fact is, you can get a color TV for fifty bucks from a thrift store or off craigslist, but cooking a decent meal for two people will cost at least five dollars in ingredients and you expect to do that three times a day. Anything more complex than oatmeal or beans and rice has skyrocketed in price over the last decade. That people have some outdated electronics in their house is a crap measurement which tells you nothing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The top 1% earn about $1.5 million on average; the top 25% average about $139,000. And that is several tiers down...
The median and mean household income is also quite close, being around $75,000 and $72,000 respectively.
I know it's popular to push a "hate the rich" meme on many places, but the data does not support the huge income disparity so often claimed. Median and mean incomes are close together, income disparity from the top 1% down to the bottom 50% is about 80 (which is significantly less than your estimate of 300 from the top 1% to the next tier, which would be top 5%), and in general wages are up an average of 4% annually for the last 18 months or so.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
In the U.S. by definition you entered ' middle class' when you had a job, bought a car, a home and sent your kids to public school.
Not a chance! A kid works 5 years at GOOG, lives in a $2400/mo apt in SF and still can't afford a car payment, mortgage and child care. A kid can even choose to work three jobs, 7 days a week for a start-up. And it will barely cover car insurance, rent and groceries but there is no pathway to a car payment, mortgage and child care for a middle class lifestyle in the United States.
Bullshit...millennials are screwed by The Brookings Institution's white washed ivory proclamations to the contrary that insurance, rent and groceries is the new middle class.
Don't live in SF where government artificially restricts the housing market. Move to Memphis, TN, where the median home price is $82,700.
I think it is a realistic market model to expect that some universities wish to realize the high student payments that can be extracted by the richest families, and thus many universities are competing to be "highly selective"
I teach at a public university that is not selective (or cannot be selective, not sure). In any event, here are their recruiting priorities (and they are open about this): international graduate students, out of state graduate students, other international and out of state students, and (finally) in state students.
I will let you guess why those are the recruiting priorities.
This is the graph you are looking for:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/...
https://www.census.gov/library...
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Do you really mean mode? Are you sure sure you do not mean the median? Mode should be irrelevant here, it should be the median and the mean. And when the two are closely aligned, it means your population probably had a traditional Gaussian distribution. - which is what we have. It is not skewed by a few rich OR poor people, but that most of the people (67% in a traditional distribution) make around the median AND mean income levels - meaning, middle class.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!