Working class: work to survive. Middle class: work to do other things. Upper middle class: work for wealth. Upper class: work optional.
People rightfully like to talk about the working poor and the disappearing middle class, but I think we are actually already past that. What we are seeing now is that between education, housing and financial insecurity it is hard to be even upper middle class anymore without existing wealth.
I guess I don't have anything to add, just struck a nerve because that is exactly how I feel, so I wanted to say something.
I'm not sure that's really true - or at least, it's an incomplete model.
Rather, what's happening with education, health care, & housing is that you have three sectors with flat productivity growth and large barriers to entry, which implies that the number of people they can serve remains constant. The population is growing. When you can provide a service to X people but there are Y > X people who need that service, Y - X people will necessarily end up going without. The financial insecurity is because of the mad scramble to avoid being part of the Y - X who get left out in this game of musical chairs.
The reason the middle class (using danan's definition of "employees with a comfortable and secure lifestyle") expanded so much after WW2 was because we had a number of technological breakthroughs that dramatically increased the productivity of these sectors. Antibiotics and vaccines meant that illnesses which previously would kill or require long medical care could be prevented by a simple shot. The green revolution increased the yields on crops by 10x. The interstate highway system and automobile opened up vast suburban areas for development, and developers (like our current president's father) became wealthy applying mass-production techniques to building housing. The number of skilled scientists in the U.S. increased dramatically during WW2 as they left turmoil in the rest of the world, which could support larger college populations.
We still see those technological breakthroughs in other areas like computers & media, but they don't happen anymore in fundamental areas of life like health care & education. Some of this is probably inherent in the problem domain (with all the easy diseases cured, we now die of heart disease, cancer, suicide, overdoses, etc, most of which have proven stubbornly resistant to cures) while some is because of artificial restrictions (like housing zoning laws).
There's probably some artificial barriers to entry for education as well - it's hard to explain how Ph.Ds have no job prospects at the same time that college tuition keeps on rising. And I suspect that has to do with college's role as a signaling device for job prospects. If a bunch of Ph.Ds wanted to open a new college where they personally tutor a bunch of incoming college freshmen for much less than college costs, those kids would probably get a better education than any of their college-bound peers, but they also wouldn't have a degree from any credible university or much in the way of job prospects.
...come to think of it, I wonder if colleges know that their primary value is as a signaling mechanism, and intentionally restrict the size of the incoming class to preserve that signal. In other words, they're aware that they don't actually add any educational value, they just ensure that they only admit students who would've succeeded anyway and then point to all their successful graduates.
I think what you're saying is that they don't add any additional educational value beyond what your hypothetical band of PhDs could. They do provide educational value and also the signalling, though perhaps they don't acknowledge the latter so much.
But at least with pre-university education, as far I've seen, the process you describe is what most private preschools, primary and secondary schools engage in: They can essentially select their student population for the children who are most prepared, either by means (== family support system) or by their natural abilities.
Even those private schools that have scholarship programs for underprivileged students only accept students who are exceptional and don't have serious social functioning issues.
These schools then point to the achievement of their students as an indication of their superior educational process (which in some cases might be true, due to just having more money to provide better educational services).
Public schools, by contrast, must accept students of all abilities, and thus look worse on paper, when they are often dealing with a much more diverse, and often more challenging set of student backgrounds.
Housing (which you have to procure from the University for at least two years), amenities, and administration, is.
You can provide a world-class education by having professors use a whiteboard to lecture to students in cargo containers, or prefabs, for a fraction of the price of a modern education. But then you don't get the 'college experience' of paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for living in a hotel, surrounded by underage boose, drugs, and parties.
A lot of the costs go into intangibles, like my college had some pricey guest lecturer programs. It is true though that university overhead has been growing quite fast lately and a lot of money in the last decade has shifted to things that are decidedly unrelated to education (I mean, LSU has their own lazy river).
Working class: One who makes money by collecting a wage.
Upper class: One who makes money through investments or similar business dealings.
Middle class: One who partially makes money by collecting a wage and partially through investing.
Wealth figures are more difficult to come by, but the internet suggests the median household has a net worth of around $200,000. However, I would venture to guess that a large portion of that is tied up in a primary household which does not normally generate any income. It is not clear how much a typical person does make in investment income.
If you are right that 60% of the population do not have investment income, that seems reasonable enough. I think it is fair to say that most people are working class. I am sure that we can agree that, under modern usage, the middle class is meant to represent something that is not easily attainable, but more attainable than upper class.
I believe that the push to educate all young Americans was a push to expand the power of the middle social classes at the expense of the typically uneducated lower classes. Success in this endeavor is measured by the proliferation of middle class norms and tastes, not necessarily the expansion of middle class economic prosperity.
This is also why so many Americans talk about being “middle class”, even if they fall well outside the middle of the economic range, because they’re talking about the middle social class(es), not the middle economic class.
Also because money is the only god in this country.
it also helps us to conveniently ignore economic sovereignty when contemplating 'success' or 'prosperity'
which of course is a useful frame given the bulk of the post war american middle class was created by essentially trading economic sovereignty in the form of small farms for corporatism
not sure how it could have developed otherwise given the rise of factory farms, etc, but this direction was certainly influenced by large players as well..
The American use of the term reflects (whether or not it is borne out in reality) the achievement of a comfortable and secure lifestyle (relative to the current time period) by an employee. In a way, it's a more flexible definition than the British one. The post WWII economic boom was the first time that, en-masse, people who were not inheritors of significant educational or monetary capital or status could achieve that lifestyle.
However, the problem with the American definition is that it chooses to ignore how much that achievement actually has to do with class and other inertial societal constructs, perhaps because frank discussion of class effects is still considered taboo in American society, whereas older societies with openly acknowledged class structures can actually have that discussion.