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Middle Class

I had an interesting conversation with my young friend S about the future of the middle class in the world. From his teenage American perspective, we focused on what was local to both of our experiences.  He argued that the risk of the death of the middle class is greatly exaggerated and cited examples of many young people who squarely belonged there because they were able to live the middle class life-style. 

 My counter argument to that was when the gap between the very rich and the very poor is extremely large and the so called middle class is way closer to the very poor than to the very rich and you plot the median incomes on a graph, its easy to see a huge void in the middle. Also, living a certain life style does not equal being able to afford it naturally and easily. 

 Everyone is clustered toward the bottom or the top just based on the scale. It is no longer possible to see the small variations between very poor, somewhat poor, somewhat middle class, solidly middle class and so forth. They are all around the same place relative to the rich who makes many orders of magnitude more than all these people. It was an interesting conversation that combined math and social studies and served as an illustration of how scaling works in life and in a graph. I left young S with some food for thought and this graph that I used to make my case


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