“What’s happening," Rose said, "is that’s where the money is.”

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Rose defines the upper middle class as households earning the equivalent of $100,000 to $349,999 a year for a family of three, in 2014 dollars. (For a single worker, that equivalent works out to just less than $58,000 a year.)

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In his new paper, released Tuesday by the Urban Institute, Rose argues that the upper middle class swelled to include a significantly larger share of U.S. workers in 2014 than it did in 1979 — and that in that time, the economy delivered much faster income gains to those upper-middle-class workers, and to very rich workers, than for everyone else.

The upper middle class grew from just less than 13 percent of the U.S. population in 1979 to nearly 30 percent in 2014, Rose found by using census data. He attributes the trend to increasing returns to higher education and advanced skills in an evolving economy.

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In that time, the middle class, the lower middle class and the poor, as he defines them, all shrunk as a share of the population; the share of the super-rich boomed.

Nearly all of that movement occurred during the mid-1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, and in the late 1990s, under President Bill Clinton, Rose's numbers suggest. The research shows little shift in the composition of the income groupings since the dawn of the 21st century.

Still, Rose's finding is far more optimistic than others have reported, including the Pew Research Center, which warned in December that the middle class (defined differently from how Rose does) has shrunk by more than 10 percentage points as a share of the population since 1971. Rose's previous work has also drawn criticism from some inequality researchers, such as the economist Dean Baker, who say it overstates the gains for middle-class workers over the past several decades.

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It's easy to quibble with Rose's boundaries for the income groups in this analysis; the cut-off for "upper middle class" falls around the 95th percentile of household incomes, according to the Census Bureau, making it sound a lot more like "rich" than any form of middle class.

But Rose's secondary finding may well draw agreement from economists concerned about rising inequality. He shows that the rich and the upper middle class, to a smaller degree, captured an increasing share of the gains from economic growth over that 35 year span. In 1979, the bottom three groups earned 70 percent of all income in the country, he estimates. By 2014, that share had dropped below 40 percent.

Rose sees, in these figures, a new explanation for today's political turmoil and a new prism for the inequality debate. The poor and the middle class are not so much angry at the top 1 percent, he says, as they are at the upper middle class — the people who used to be middle class like them but who now live in nicer houses and drive sports cars and, Rose says, maybe look down on the workers left behind in their rise.

“It’s bittersweet," he said of the findings, "in a sense that it looks to be a good thing — everyone’s moving up! Who could be against it?" The downside, he added, is the elevation of a group of people “who are different from the people below them, and notice it, and the people below them resent it.”