Who is middle-class?
The North American images and conceptions of “middle class” are misleading: If you earn $75,000 a year in Canada, you aren't middle-class; rather, you fall in the top 10 per cent of income earners. Internationally, such judgments are even less useful: A family income of $30,000 to $65,000, squarely in the middle in Canada, would place you in most countries' upper ultra-elite.
Subjectively, middle-class status means freedom from absolute poverty, the ability to borrow money, home ownership, the ability to put your children through school (and likely some postsecondary education) and some sources of savings and equity that could be used to start a small business. These values are common badges of middle-class status around the world and are increasingly what the world's poor aspire to.
But finding this middle ground is harder than it sounds. There are several possible methods.
Locate the middle group of earners You divide the population into equal-sized 10ths or fifths, each holding the same number of people, and see what they earn. In Canada, the middle one-third are those families earning about $35,000 to $70,000 per year. But the relative size of that middle third, in this scheme, will always remain exactly the same, making it impossible to judge if the middle class is growing or shrinking.
Define the ‘middle strata' The ‘middle strata' are those earning 75 to 150 per cent of the country's average income. Though the measure can be misleading because of some tricky math, a group of scholars led by the World Bank's Branko Milanovic recently tried to do something similar for the entire world. They divided the planet into a “lower class” - those with annual incomes less than the median income of Brazil (about $4,000 (U.S.) in purchasing power) - and an “upper class,” consisting of those making more than the median income of Italy ($17,000 (U.S.)). The lower class made up 78 per cent of all the world's people, the upper class, 11 per cent and the middle - those living between those limits - made up another 11 per cent.
Classifying the countries themselves, rather than the individuals in them, yields similar results: About 11 per cent of countries were classified as “middle-income.”
Go by social function or consumer power You can skip money altogether and look at social roles. From its beginnings in the French Revolution, the popular concept of “middle class” has had more to do with what this class does than how much it earns. Initially, it referred to the bourgeoisie (business owners), but in the 20th century, it came to refer more to stable incomes and reliable pensions; the propensity to save or invest at least small amounts of money; access to education; and the ability to start small and medium-sized businesses.
Some agencies have come to define middle-class status by the simplest of all functions - consumerism. The ability to buy things other than the basic necessities of life (food, fuel, clothing) represents a step above poverty, if not a solid middle. Marketing companies have set this threshold at a family income of $1,500 (U.S.) per year for countries like India and China; there are probably more than a billion people in the world who meet it.
We will measure middle classness by a higher function - home ownership. Although there are places in Africa, the Middle East and South America without the same conventions of property ownership, in most places owning a house, outright or through a mortgage, means your escape from poverty is likely to last a long time, if not for several generations.
Most measures of middle-class status describe the same groups of people in most of the world's poor countries: Those who manage to buy their first house generally earn $6,000 to $10,000 (U.S.), which fits neatly into the middle group of world income earners, according to Mr. Milanovic's definition.
And it happens to be the amount of family income that people in India, China and most of South America describe as “middle-class.” So in that neighbourhood, it is safe to say, lies the world's real middle.
