Global Class Composition

[28350]

I was reading this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class), and I freaked out when I read this:

In February 2009, the Economist magazine announced that over half the world's population now belongs to the middle class, as a result of rapid growth in emerging countries. It characterized the middle class as having a reasonable amount of discretionary income, so that they do not live from hand to mouth as the poor do, and defined it as beginning at the point where people have roughly a third of their income left for discretionary spending after paying for basic food and shelter. This allows people to buy consumer goods, improve their health care, and provide for their children’s education. Most of the emerging middle class consists of people who are middle-class by the standards of the developing world but not the rich one, since their money incomes do not match developed country levels, but the percentage of it which is discretionary does. By this definition, the number of middle class people in Asia exceeded that in the West sometime around 2007 or 2008.
What exactly is the class breakdown of the world?

[Glenn Beck]

The Economist is basically defining middle class as individuals that are not currently in poverty. That's pretty much it as far as I can see. According to them, it seems, anyone who has about a third of their income left over after they pay for food and shelter is middle class.

[the last donut of the night]

The Economist? I hear good things of it!

http://www.artofthestate.co.uk/photos/cauty_economist.jpg

[Leonid Brozhnev]

The Economist is basically defining middle class as individuals that are not currently in poverty. That's pretty much it as far as I can see. According to them, it seems, anyone who has about a third of their income left over after they pay for food and shelter is middle class.

What I was thinking, their definition is bullshit, so are their figures. Over 5 Billion people live on less than $10 a day according to the World Bank,


For the 95% on $10 a day, see Martin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen and Prem Sangraula, Dollar a day revisited, World Bank, May 2008. They note that 95% of developing country population lived on less than $10 a day. Using 2005 population numbers, this is equivalent to just under 79.7% of world population, and does not include populations living on less than $10 a day from industrialized nations.

So where the hell they are getting over 3 Billion middle class people from I have no idea.

[Glenn Beck]

What I was thinking, their definition is bullshit, so are their figures. Over 5 Billion people live on less than $10 a day according to the World Bank,



So where the hell they are getting over 3 Billion middle class people from I have no idea.

Well if you've got 10 dollars a day and you only spend 7 on food and housing you're "middle class", sez The Economist.

FWIW the report is entitled "Burgeoning Bourgeoisie", which in itself says volumes about the level of understanding about class the authors possess.

[ed miliband]

'Middle class' is a term used so liberally it seems to have very little - if any - meaning. David Cameron is apparently a 'middle class' man and he is the heir to millions, and yet £24,000 is the average wage in the UK (apparently) - is a person who earns such a wage middle class? According to some, yes.

Conservatives use to term middle class because it's seemingly unthreatening, and claiming to stand up for middle class people and values in an age where 'everybody is middle class' must seem like a good electoral strategy. Liberals tend to use it when they want to hint at some sort of class analysis, but are too PC to do so, and just as 'middle class' is unthreatening to most, it is also fairly inoffensive.

[soyonstout]

creamy layer?:drool: (sorry i don't mean to be a jerk, I just like the phrasing)

[FreeFocus]

Class is not defined by income. The majority of the people in the world work in factories, farms etc to survive. That does not make them "middle class". There may be a creamy layer of the working class forming the labor aristocracy, but they are only present in the imperialist countries.

I can agree with the bold, but it's simply not possible for a millionaire, or even someone who makes $250,000 a year, to be "working class." Their interests in the maintenance of the capitalist, imperialist system is clear by the way they vote, what they support, and what they invest their money in. No investment banker is "working class."