I’d be more sympathetic if I wasn’t one of those “barons” as you label us.
I think you’re misinterpreting the tone of what @Doctorow wrote.
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I don’t think it was malicious; I do think that it was cluelessly privileged, an example of attitudes that are distressingly common amongst white tech professionals.
As I said, I try to keep my anger focussed on the primary cause: actually malicious plutocrats. This sort of thing arouses irritation rather than anger.
I’m trying to understand what it is that you’re actually annoyed about here?
That folks have different ideas of what “middle class” means?
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I think the main takeaway here is middle class families can no longer afford housing in San Francisco (for ANY reasonable definition of “middle class”).
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My point was that, literally, a decade ago a family of two upper middle class engineers couldn’t afford a house in San Francisco. It’s only gotten worse since then.
My house in Oakland a decade ago was a half million dollars and that was after prices had started to crash and before the new boom.
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Seriously, who exactly buys a million plus dollar house? It isn’t the much hated “techie” locally.
Extreme wealth inequality puts a lie to the idea of meritocracy.
Except for the idea that every trust fund dummy can own others’ merit. If only someone had a patent on that.
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What irritates me is that the lower stratum of the upper class have a habit of ignoring massive injustice to the lower classes while being very concerned with minor injustices directed at their own class.
No, it’s not a perfectly rational irritation. But it does exist, and I don’t think it should be ignored.
Tangential, but possibly illustrative: my Mum is a very good person. Empathetic, kind, caring, responsible; now that she’s retired, she keeps busy by being the volunteer mental health ombudsperson (i.e. making sure that involuntarily admitted psych patients aren’t being abused) for her district.
Although we didn’t have much money when I was growing up, these days she is more than comfortable. Worked her way to a senior executive position in the public service, married a successful academic, invested in high-gain real estate, etc.
She’s also a lifelong supporter of centre-left politics, who is intellectually revolted by bigotry and injustice. Those issues lead her to vote for lefty candidates and occasionally make a small political donation.
But you know what really got her fired up to the point where she got seriously involved in political activism?
Someone put in a development application to open a Bed & Breakfast on her street.
Aboriginal health, refugee internment, war and torture: these get a letter to the editor. Increased traffic and parking shortages in her neighbourhood? Full-effort campaigning and marching in the street.
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Yes, people focus on their own interests. You do it too. I do it. Everyone does it.
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Is that for all of California? Farm workers as well as those who work in Silicon Valley? There are a lot of places to live in California which are as affordable as Nebraska, but they’re not commuting distance from most salaried jobs.
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Since when did $100K become middle class? I mean, seriously! The average US income is $51K. THAT would be middle class.
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Hell, I’d buy that.
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Most families these days are two-income families and $50K a year isn’t an especially high income for a college-educated adult, especially if you live in a major city. Would you call a family with two full-time teachers scraping to afford a one-bedroom condo in S.F. “upper class?” I wouldn’t.
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Yeah, CA has a very wide disparity even within the state.
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Clearly no one knows what we mean by ‘middle class,’ but I’m sure it doesn’t mean ‘average income.’ If it meant ‘average income’ then a phrase like “grow the middle class” would be meaningless.
Imagine for a moment that we live in a society that actually has clearly demarked strata: visualize a bell curve, except instead of a single bell it has three humps with low spots in between. The left-most hump we will call ‘working class’ (even though the more-accurate and less-polite term is ‘lower class’), the second hump we call ‘middle class’ and the right-most hump we call ‘upper class.’ We can make the humps wider or narrower, but we’re still calling the humps lower, middle, and upper.
This all holds together if we’re in a Charles Dickens novel. The ‘lower class’ occupies maybe 90% of the population. Then we have a little 5% slice that’s the middle class (they have educations, and office jobs, and their own bedrooms, and get novels written about them) and then there’s another few percent off on the right of people who own estates and live off investment income and such. Upper class.
In modern America, here’s what our graph looks like:
Uhoh, that graph only has two humps. The second hump starts at $200,000, which is $35,000 in 1970s dollars, about 2x what folks were making at the meat-packing plant when I was growing up. So let’s call that right-side hump ‘middle and upper class’ and just accept that 96% of US households are neither.
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I understand your point, but by definition, middle means a certain thing. Yes, living in New York or San Francisco or Chicago, etc. costs more relatively, but even then, you can’t define a $100K or higher income as Middle class, particularly when that puts you in the upper 10% of earners.
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But it means different things in different places. What is “middle class” by the standards of Omaha would be considered “upper class” in Bangalore. By the same token, a comfortable middle class income in San Francisco is significantly higher than a comfortable middle class income in much of the rest of the country.
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Everyone, it seems, has their own definition.
My definition puts me squarely in the middle of the middle class, which I suppose, is standard given my perspective.
I would say that the division between lower and middle class is one of equity, and the division between middle and upper class is one of passive income.
By my definition, the lower class is generally unable to afford the down payment or monthly payments on a mortgage, and is thus unable to start building equity towards owning their own house. Once you have income stable enough to afford to pay for a house (even if you choose to continue renting and start placing the excess income into investments), your equity will start to grow.
If you keep building your equity, eventually you’ll have enough to start making passive income - dividends, rental properties, etc. Once that passive income is greater than the income that you make from employment (assuming that your total income exceeds the amount that you need to live), that’s where I’d draw the divisor for upper-class. At that point, every extra dollar you make can be poured into making yourself additional passive income, which becomes a feedback loop, and eventually you can stop working altogether if you so choose.
It’s not the traditional definition of “middle-class,” but I find it more useful than measuring based on income, as cost-of-living can take someone who’d be able to afford a house in one place, and put them either barely scraping by in a rental place in a different city, or able to own their home outright and start looking into passive income in a third place.
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Hm… if we define middle class as ‘people with a non-negligible net worth’ then the middle-class might be as much as 50% of the US population. That’s a much less depressing outlook!
Which is something of the issue, isn’t it. San Fran shouldn’t have its own “special” definition of the phrase “middle class” because when we do that, we basically destroy any meaning the phrase has.
This, btw, goes for most cities and countries as well.
