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FORTUNE.COM// JA N.1 .19THE VAST MAJORITY OF AMERICANS
consider themselves “middle class.” No one
can quite agree, though, on what that means.
Richard Reeves, along with colleagues at
the Brookings Institution, has cataloged
no fewer than a dozen economic formulas
that seek to define this elastic cohort largely
by what people earn each year: household
income between X and Y; personal income
that’s within some percentage of the na-
tional median; distance from the poverty
line; and so on. Combine the lot, and the
range of who might be considered middle
class is extraordinarily expansive—including
anyone from a single, part-time bartender
scratching by on $13,000 a year to a subur-
ban power couple pulling in $230,000, or
90% of American households in all.Other economists and social scientists stretch the boundar-
ies of membership in different dimensions, based on degrees of
wealth or spending power, professional status or education level,
what neighborhood you live in, or even on that very American of
conceits, self-determination—which is to say, if you think you’re
middle class, you are.
“I sometimes think there are as many definitions of the middle
class as there are Americans claiming to be middle class,” says
Reeves, a senior fellow at Brookings and director of its Future of
the Middle Class Initiative, who quickly throws in one of his favor-
ite noneconomic definitions: “You’re middle class if you have two
refrigerators. You have a new one in your kitchen, and you have
your old one in the garage or basement, where you keep your beer.”
The U.S. is a middle-class nation—it was founded on middle-
class ideals, he continues. And so defining one’s self as middle class
is, perhaps counterintuitively, aspirational in some ways. “Ameri-
cans don’t like the idea of seeing themselves as upper crust, snobs,
snooty, aristocrats, upper class, et cetera,” says Reeves, an econo-
mist and self-described “recovered Brit” who has written a new
book,Dream Hoarders, precisely on that rarefied American upper
crust. “People also don’t like to think of themselves as poor, or even
as working class. To the extent that the U.S. has a class conscious-
ness, it tends to be around the middle class.”
All of which creates a challenge of measurement. If sizing up
the middle class is difficult enough, it’s that much harder to say
that circumstances within this group have changed. And yet that
is precisely what we’ve devoted the 28 pages in this special reportA JOURNEY INTERRUPTED
American workers are
increasingly unlikely to
attain the same incomes
and living standards that
their parents did.
SPECIAL REPORT
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