I can’t prove it statistically, but it’s a lot more expensive to be “middle class” now than it used to be.
When I was a kid, most people now would think of us as “poor”. No running water. No indoor plumbing. House heated by a large rock fireplace of an old style that held and radiated a lot more heat than fireplaces do now. For light, we had kerosene lamps and these harrowingly dangerous lamps that burned “white gasoline”. But we weren’t considered “poor” for the neighborhood because in that era the area where I live was really primitive and poor.
As a teenager, my family would have been considered “middle class”. We lived in that same house, but had indoor plumbing and electricity. We had one car (bought used) and, miracle of miracles, at a point in time we even had two! Neither car had AC. Neither had anything electronic. No air bags. No GPS.
But my wife, who grew up in a big city, would have thought us poor; not so much because of money differences between my family and hers, but because, as urban dwellers they had so much more available to them. They had television years before we did. As a kid, we listened to the radio. Radios were really inexpensive. They wore clothes we would have thought remarkable. But that was because they had them available, where we didn’t.
We sang and played the piano for much of our entertainment, where my wife had all sorts of entertaining things available to her. But they all cost money. We did ride horses, because country horses were dirt cheap. They were cheap because farmers had just started using tractors and idle horses were everywhere. My wife didn’t ride because in the city only the rich could do that.
A lot of what people think of as a “middle class life” is simply relative to what others have available to them and obtain. Where I live, it’s not strange at all for, say, a dentist to live in an 80 year old house in a mixed-class neighborhood. In the city, you don’t do that.
I have a brother who lives in a fairly upscale suburb of a large city. It was inconceivable to him to NOT live there because the schools elsewhere were bad, the neighborhoods elsewhere were dangerous and there were few infrastructure benefits in living elsewhere. He can’t have a pickup parked in his yard, like I can. He has to wear better clothing than I have to. He has “common elements” to pay for, where I don’t. He paid to send his kids to the subdivision “club” swimming pool, where I didn’t. Unless you live in a stable “ethnic” neighborhood in a major city (like “The Hill” in St. Louis) you can’t live where it’s cheap. You have to spend a lot of money if you want to live middle class. And to spend it, you have to make it.
My brother is a good man, and I don’t blame him for what he felt he had to do to have a decent life. But in terms of wealth, I have more than he does. And our social status is no different. We’re both “middle class” where we live. But his “middle classness” costs so much more.
I sometimes think the economics and social structure of our time is nuts. The very structure of our cities and infrastructure mandates a socioeconomic segregation that sometimes seems to me nearly as rigid as the caste system in India.
