Middle Class Essay

1096 Words3 Pages

Birdsall, Graham, and Pettinato states that middle class is “the backbone of both the market economy and of democracy in most advanced societies” (Banerjee and Duflo 3). Everyone has freedom to decide what they do, where they live, and who they get married. However, there is an aspect that people are fell into when they are born, social classes. The social hierarchy of America consists of three classes, they are upper, middle, and lower class. The vast majority of Americans fall into the category of the middle class. Because of their buying power, the middle class greatly influences the American economic system. The term middle class gets thrown around too much and it is time that a more concrete definition is introduced. First of all, let’s …show more content…

Middle class is defined in different ways by different people. For example, Easterly describes middle class “as those lying between the 20th and 80th percentile on the consumption distribution” (Banerjee and Duflo 5); or Birdsall, Graham, and Pettinato says this class “as those between 75 and 125 percent of median per capita income” (Banerjee and Duflo 7). In America, people are divided into classes by many factors. The most popular factors are income and education. For income, people in this class make less money than upper class. Pew 's analysis in the article of Philip Bump says that middle class “holds less aggregate income than the upper class”; this is true. However, people in this class have better jobs and salaries than poor class. The working poor tend to have less stable jobs than their middle class brothers. Because of the temporary nature of these jobs, they have a …show more content…

Middle class attitudes and morals have much influence on the world. Politicians actively court this group of people because they make up such a large portion of the population. Words like "family values" and "moral majority" are used to persuade this large group of people to support candidate "a" or reject candidate "b". The candidates elected may not always be the best for the middle class, but they will be the ones that were the most successful at connecting with them. Most national politicians are not a part of the middle class and have to put a lot of effort to be perceived as "one of the

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