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If you think about it, it is a little retro for any politician to be using the word 'class' at all

When a politician promises to create policies helping your own economic class, he is implicitly avoiding the social mobility question. The message is: don’t worry about escaping upward from the middle class, or helping your children escape it! Your suspicion that there is not a chance in hell of that happening is probably justified! We’ll just try to make life comfortable in the particular box enclosing you and your posterity.

The trick here is that in general, and throughout the OECD, almost everybody considers himself “middle-class” whatever his position in the real income distribution. The exceptions are Britain and the old Soviet bloc, where the “working class” label still has contrarian prestige. Outside those zones of lingering socialist intellectual influence, an appeal to the middle class is psychically received by everyone who is not, at that exact moment, either cooking meth on a camp stove or hiring stewardesses for his Gulfstream jet.

Photo by Ryan Remiorz/CP

In fact, any quantitative analysis of the “middle class” is bound to be sensitive to the definition of it. In the social sciences that aren’t economics, the divisions made between the “middle class,” the “working class” and the various other boxes are often occupational. They ignore income measures altogether: an equipment operator making $140,000 a year in Fort McMurray would be considered working class.

If you’re doing economics rather than sociology, defining “middle class” by income rather than culture, education or occupational prestige makes sense. The well-being of the “middle class” is practically important in a world where a successful state is bound to survive by (directly or otherwise) taxing incomes broadly. As a matter of pure technique, a country needs its middle class to not feel too disloyal to the ruling authority.