Of all the words that have been spoken and written about the upcoming election, the term “middle class” is probably the most frequent.
It isn’t quite clear to me that people who use it know what it means.
When I was a graduate student at Michigan State University in the mid '60s, I lucked into a course on social class. The professor was W. Lloyd Warner, the acknowledged world expert on the subject. I learned more in those 10 weeks than I did in any other course I ever took. And I have taken a lot.
The subject emerged again in my life when I was teaching marketing at Cambrian College in Sudbury. Almost every introduction to marketing course taught at Canadian colleges and universities has a unit on social class.
Millions of advertising dollars are expended based on social class assumptions about the intended target markets. Products promoted on the television coverage of important golf and tennis tournaments are very different from those flogged during car racing events.
Because it had been many years since I studied and taught the topic of social class, I decided to check out a half dozen sources to see if anything had changed. It hadn’t. I was surprised to note that Warner’s work was still cited in the most up to date references I checked.
The best definition of social class that I could come up with was “a relatively permanent and orderly division in a society whose members share similar values, interests, attitudes, opinions and behaviours.”
Social class is not determined by a single factor but a combination of such things as occupation, income, education and the above mentioned values, interests and behaviours, etc.
According to Warner and many subsequent authors, there are six social classes and people rarely move out of the social class into which they are born. Some exceptions would be individuals who receive very good educations at prestigious universities. The following are brief descriptions and comments on each class.
The six classes begin with the upper upper class which is comprised of the social elite who live on inherited wealth, have well-known family names and serve on high profile corporate and charitable boards.
They make up about one per cent of the population.
The next is lower upper (two per cent) with members who have high income or wealth earned by exceptional ability in the professions or business.
Upper middle folks (12 per cent) possess neither family status nor unusual wealth and have earned their positions as professionals, independent business people or corporate managers.
Members of the lower middle group (32 per cent) earn average pay in blue and white collar jobs and they struggle “to keep up with the Joneses.”
The upper lower class (47 per cent) don’t have very much education, are unskilled and live a general “working class” lifestyle.
The lower lower class (six per cent) are mostly poverty stricken and many depend on welfare to survive.
I don’t know if the political and chattering classes know what the term “middle class” means, or if they are really talking about “middle income,” which is very different and relatively easy to define. I like to think of it as the middle three quintiles of gross household income minus what the kids pick up at part-time jobs.
Unlike middle class, middle income is not permanent and people can and do move in and out of it frequently.
Income levels can change dramatically for the better with a significant work place promotion, an investment windfall or when a stay-at-home partner re-enters the work force. They can go in the opposite direction when people retire, lose a job or suffer through a long strike.
There is a lot of information about voting patterns based on age groups and other demographic factors. But I have seen little data based on social class.
All this having been said, it seems that when the politicians are referring to the middle class they really mean middle income. They probably know the difference but refer to middle class because, like my students, everybody thinks of themselves as “middle class.” Unfortunately, many of them aren’t. And they are voters no politician wants to offend.
William McLeodSudbury