Krugman: there has been a sharp increase in the number of people calling themselves lower class.

[pampango]

The Realities of Class Begin To Sink In

One of the odd things about America has long been the immense range of people who consider themselves middle class — and are deluding themselves. Low-paid workers who would be considered poor by international standards, say with incomes below half the median, nonetheless considered themselves lower-middle class; people with incomes four or five times the median considered themselves, at most, upper-middle class.

But this may be changing. According to a new Pew survey (pdf), there has been a sharp increase in the number of people calling themselves lower class, and a somewhat smaller rise in the number calling themselves lower-middle, so that at this point the combined “lower” categories are close to a plurality of the population — in fact, closing in on, um, 47 percent:



This is, I believe, a very significant development. The whole politics of poverty since the 70s has rested on the popular belief that the poor are Those People, not like us hard-working real Americans. This belief has been out of touch with reality for decades — but only now does reality seem to be breaking in. But what it means now is that conservatives claiming that character defects are the source of poverty, and that poverty programs are bad because they make life too easy, are now talking to an audience with large numbers of Not Those People who realize that they are among those who sometimes need help from the safety net.

And this still has a way to go. To Americans at the 86th percentile: if you think you’re upper-middle class, you really have no idea.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/the-realities-of-class-begin-to-sink-in/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

[DetlefK]

1. From The Simpsons:

Lisa asked Homer what class of society their family belonged to. His answer: "Upper lower middle-class."

[LuvNewcastle]

2. I don't really like to classify myself, but if I did I'd have to say that

I've drifted downward through the years to the lower class. I was raised in an upper-middle class home and I always thought of my family as being middle class when I was growing up. But when I started working, I came to work a lot of service industry jobs and I began to think of myself as working class. Now that I've been on disability for a few years with no other income, I'd have to say I was in the lower class. So now the rest of my family is upper-middle and I'm in the lower class, so we're having less and less in common as the years go by.

But all of that is only taking income into consideration, which I don't. Where I live, when someone says that something is "low class" or that someone is a "low-class bastard," and they say things like that frequently, they are talking about traits beyond income. They're talking about behavior. So when I call myself "lower class," I always qualify it to mean income-wise. But you know, things are changing when people are actually calling themselves lower class. When I was growing up, no one called themselves "lower class," not even poor people. I never would have thought of calling myself that. But times and situations have changed. I don't know what it says about me or the rest of society, but I think it's an important distinction.

[Fumesucker]

3. Figuring out they're not temporarily embarassed millionaires after all

Comes as something of a shock it does.