I've recently started to notice a very strange and alarming trend: many people describe "middle class" as a function of possessions, rather than as a function of income. Often times, the word lifestyle gets thrown onto the end of "middle class." And typically when "middle class" transitions to "middle class lifestyle," I hear people babble incessantly about the need to live in a nice suburb, put their children into good schools, drive new cars, have all of the latest gadgets and maybe take a couple of vacations every year. This is frightening. Somehow, the idea of middle class has seemingly merged with the concept of keeping up with the Joneses, which can lead to incredibly irresponsible consumer behavior.

The Middle Class is Actually in the Middle

I feel almost foolish for writing that header, but it is so often misunderstood. In the United States, the median household income, the real middle, is $51,939, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. For simplicity, let's divide the world into three classes, lower, middle and upper, based on percentile. We can assume that the lower class would represent the lowest 25 percent, the middle class would represent the 25th - 75th percentile and the upper class would represent the 75th - 100th percentile. That would make the income range for middle class approximately $25,000 - $90,000. The middle 50% of all Americans fall into this range, and so this is the middle class. Simple.

The Middle Class Isn't Shrinking

Politicians from both sides of the aisle love to make strange statements like "the middle class is shrinking" or "the middle class is under siege." These are dramatic statements seeing as the middle class is a mathematical definition. It is true that the distribution of income changes over time and tends to reward the top 1% of all earners, but the middle class remains intact. The country and the world have economic problems surrounding the distribution of wealth, but claiming defeat for the middle class is not the solution.