What is 'Middle Class'?

"Middle class" has never had a precise definition. Personally, I would consider a person to be in the middle class if they're not financially independent (IE, they need to have a job), but they have enough money that adequate food, shelter and access to medical care aren't in jeopardy.

I really prefer the classic 'Marxist' definition. I.e. 'middle class' is the petit bourgeoisie and other small-to-middle owners capital.

Income does not directly influence classification - a highly-paid professional is not a member of middle class, but a small shopowner is.

I would agree with Some Guy, except I would make it a bit more detailed. For example, I wouldn't consider someone making $250,000/year, living in Indiana (where cost of living is relatively low), but spending all of his/her income (and therefore "needing a job") to be middle-class. I guess I tend to think of middle-class as defined by a combination of one's income, lifestyle, and security (although not necessarily a linear combination). Because cost of living varies throughout the US, the exact combination of income and expenses necessary to qualify as "middle class" also varies (e.g., someone can be middle-class in Pittsburgh on a much lower salary than in NYC).

As for your experiences with the "pedigree" thing--I grew up in New England and have lived my entire life on the East Coast, and have never once had anyone ask me who my relatives are (or judge me based on it). Now, when we moved into a small town when I was younger, there was a certain amount of tension there--not because I wasn't "pedigreed" but because I "warn't from around heeyah".

In my experience, judging people based on their relatives or "connections" is more of an upper-class thing (i.e., related to a person's perceptions of their "rank" in society) than an East-Coast thing. None of the New Englanders or New Yorkers I know would ever ask you who your ancestors were (unless, of course, you turned out to be related to them), or care if you had relatives on the Mayflower.

. . . an amusingly British commentary on their class system (a system that is probably breaking down these days), but I think there are some echoes of this class system in America . . .

I know it is not quite the same thing, but three or four years ago I saw a report (in The Economist?) on the change in relative earning ability over the generations in the US compared with the UK. The two countries were similar but in the US the correlation between generations was increasing whereas in the UK it was decreasing.

One has to only look at the mystique associated with the Kennedy clan to realize that the class system is alive and well in the US.

Middle class is not people who make over 250K. People keep saying that taxing that crowd is going to hurt small businesses, and I'd like to know what the hell small business owner makes that much because obviously, I'm doing the wrong thing with my life. My grandma owned a small town bookstore, and she was lucky if she took home a salary of 30K a year, but of course, that was back when you could own a small house on that salary, oh, twenty years ago.
I'm going to say that if you make between 45K and 150K you are probably middle class. Those numbers are fuzzy. If you live and work in a town of under 50K people, you're probably middle class.
I also reckon middle class depends on how much the price of living is where you live. When I first moved to the bay area, I was told that low income housing was reserved for people with salaries of 60K or less. Coming from a small town in Utah, I was like, "damn! When I got my 60K a year job, I thought 'I'm in the money!' I'm rich!", but in the bay area, apparently not.
In the bay area, if you can afford a house by the train tracks, you are definitely middle class. If you can afford to live in an apartment that doesn't look like a cheap motel, you are middle class.
If you not afford to buy a small house not by the train tracks but did anyway, and you are up to your neck in debt at this point, you are middle class.
So, that's my definition. Hope that clears things up for you, Joe, since so few people in Washington seem to be clear on who they're talking to as far as the middle class goes.

I second the definition of middle class being those people who have insufficient wealth to be able to live off of the proceeds of that wealth. If you have to provide some type of labor in order to meet your needs and wants, you are not rich. Unfortunately that definition does not provide an easy sound bite number that can be used by politicians to say that they will tax everyone who makes more than some arbitrary amount of income.

On the lower end, I would say that middle class ends where a salary is insufficient to provide for minimal food, shelter, health care, transportation and other necessities of life.

Yeah, but did you listen to Biden?!?!? "Get involved." Video of the meetings will be online. The results will be on line. Holy Crap!! Talk about night and day. Can you imagine Cheney or Bush or any Republican asking for input from citizens? Can you imagine anyone in the previous administration opening up a meeting, or publishing their results? It's like someone walking into a cold dark room and throwing open the curtains. Wee!!!

I think some guy has a fairly good working definition. M/C covers quite a wide range, so broad that I'm not sure how meaningful it is as a single class. Middle class, historically, was in the middle between landed gentry and people who were tenants of landed gentry, ie people in trade or shopkeepers. Landed gentry in North America would translate into inherited wealth--such that a person can live off the investments. There is a difference conceptually between poor and working class, so you have to think about how you want to break that down. To understand the range of middle class, I think that Bourdieu's habitus makes more sense in terms of understanding class as a combination of economic and cultural capital. Scienceggrl, you would fit into the high cc but low ec quadrant. If you have neither economic capital nor cultural capital, you're working at a Mcjob, if you've got a job.

That's an interesting question to me. I was born in the 1960s in what is sometimes seen as the last bastion of the blue collar middle class - the communities of people employed in unionized, skilled labor in the rust belt cities, prior to the "rusting". We considered ourselves middle class but when I got to college i found that academia employed a different measure and now I was "working class". Although we did not have luxuries, we enjoyed a considerable security from health insurance, good schools and inexpensive housing.

Oddly, I and many of my peers got less financial aid than the children of families with higher incomes because of odd ways the formulas were skewed at that time, toward more traditionally middle class families. (by the time I went to college my dad's factory was closed, yet I still have my 1984 financial aid document stating that I was not eligible for any aid). I vaguely remember my mom saying we were screwed because we had no mortgage - most people in our community owned small, cheap homes they could pay off quickly due to fears of job loss and old world fears of debt.