If the majority of your income comes from salary or wages, you are not in the upper class, no matter how high that number is. The primary defining characteristic of the upper class, in my opinion, is supporting your lifestyle via your ownership, rather than your labor.

Certainly, there is some fuzz and overlap there. A retiree earning $50k/year on dividends and capital gains meets that criterion, while a top-shelf skilled professional or DINK couple earning $400k/year solely from working 40 hours per week (each) does not. The latter could certainly become upper class rather easily just by paying off debt, avoiding unnecessary expenses, and dumping excess cash into index funds, but as long as that plan can be cut short by two simple words ("you're fired") they haven't crossed that class boundary yet.

Generally, when the middle class shrinks, it isn't because a significant portion of them are becoming upper class. More often, it is because expenses rise faster than prevailing wages. The mark of the middle class, to me, is being able to comfortably pay all living expenses with all adults in the household working no more than one full-time job (probably salaried, but not necessarily) at 40 hours per week. You can get everything you need with just one job, and some of what you merely want.

The instant you cross that line where you have to abandon desires and work longer to make ends meet, you're in the lower class. There are certain needs in the US that are not actually survival-level necessities, but rather mandatory to meaningfully participate in civil society. Those have expanded. In earlier decades, you essentially just needed a motor vehicle, a location-based telephone number, and a mailing address. Now, you also need one or more person-based telephone numbers, an Internet connection, and various forms of insurance. Expense categories expanded, even as costs for each expense rose. Median wages stayed stagnant. So people drop out of the middle class. They stop going to the movies and take on more hours or a part time job in order to pay their phone bill.

>Median wages stayed stagnant. So people drop out of the middle class. They stop going to the movies and take on more hours or a part time job in order to pay their phone bill.

But we can get that "side-hustle" now, so that makes it all right?

Right. Those Uber ads are rather tone-deaf to fears of downward class mobility. They try to paint the company as helping middle-class people earn extra money to buy the things they want, when in actuality the majority of rides are driven by lower-class people that are trying to earn their living as drivers.

One person's second job may be another's primary source of income.

Divorces went up after becomming easy and acceptable, but then slowly down. Upper and middle class divorce less then poor people.

Besides, two salaries won't move you from middle class to upper class.

This doesn't make any sense. Just because divorce rates have gone up somewhat since the 40s doesn't mean that it's structural. People get remarried. Also, if one person makes 60k and then moves in with another person making 60k, they don't magically become upper class at 120k, because they still have most of the expenses of two people minus some savings in housing (which most people wave by buying huge houses)

Edit: and 120k/yr is nowhere near "upper-class"

actually, if you define upper class as the top quintile in household income (a common objective definition, as opposed to the also common colloquial "how you feel" definition), then anything above $112K in household income is upper class:

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-q...

While "top quintile" might be a useful economic definition, it's not the dictionary definition, nor the one used by many Americans when discussing class (which has major social considerations, in addition to economic ones).

From Merriam-Webster: a social class occupying a position above the middle class and having the highest status in a society

Many of the HN regulars are upper income, but very few would qualify as upper class (most of us lack the political and social connections).

Sure it's objective in the mathematical sense, but if you have 2 kids and two people working with a combined income of 112k you'd be upper class? I feel like a better way of looking at it would be average household income/average area COL per person or something, right?

Additionally, if the wealth distribution curve for the country is basically a backwards "L" with the bend at the ~99th percentile, the difference between the 60th and 80th percentiles isn't really meaningful since the "upper class" is clearly the 99th percentile.

Edit: obviously there are also social caste connotations that used to be applied here too, but I'm only interested in the economic definition.

In a CNBC Millionaire Survey it can be observed that a majority of millionaires polled, representing the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, described themselves as middle class (44%) or upper middle class (40%)... Estimates for the size of this group [upper class] commonly vary from 1% to 2%, while some surveys have indicated that as many as 6% of Americans identify as "upper class." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_upper_class

And on the contrary, (in an oldish article), 19% of Americans believe they are in the top 1% of income earners, and 20% more believe they will one day be [1].

1: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-hop...

That might well be accurate. Class and income are not the same thing. A college professor is upper class even if they don't make millions, because of connections and authority. Likewise, "a single-digit millionaire doesn't have effective access to the legal system."

It's important to use feelings to divide people into classes, because that's one easy way we can justify hatred and dehumanization for ourselves.

I don't think that's true. While the term is of course loosely defined, unless you are at the top of the middle class, you can't leave the middle class by simply doubling income.

> The middle class is decreasing mainly because of divorce and thus the creation of single parent homes

Citation needed.

What, exactly, is the magnitude of the effect of single-parent homes on the size of the middle class? Without answering that, your "gut instinct" explanation, if that's what it is, is meaningless.

There is plenty of data showing the negative income effects of divorce and single parent households.

One major conclusion of their research is that the family income of children whose parents divorce and remain divorced for at least six years falls by 40 to 45 percent.

http://www.nber.org/digest/jul02/w8786.html

As per the Census Bureau (table F-10), in 2014, married couple families with one or more children under 18 years, earned an average income of $111,278. In other words, traditional two-parent families earned an income that was more than three times higher than for households headed by a single mother.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2015/11/18/the-cost...

That doesn't answer my question at all.

Saying that the income of a single-parent family is lower does not remotely answer the question of "What is the magnitude of the effect of single-parent homes on the size of the middle class?"

I actually went and looked up the tables in the census: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families...

We have the same percentage of single parent families now as in 1995 (29%). That's over 20 years, the number has barely budged. So how does your answer relate to the question of the decline of the middle class since then?

Sounds more like a symptom than a cause, and even that's guessing at best.