Over this period, employment of the upper-middle and middle class swelled by 10 to 20 percentage points, while the ranks of the working class dwindled everywhere. Based on the Luxembourg Income Study, we trace the evolution of employment and income by class for France, Germany, Poland, Spain, the UK and US, 1980-2020. However, this narrative ignores basic insights from class theory and lacks empirical evidence. ![]() ![]() This narrative of a squeezed middle class suggests that people both above and below fared better in terms of employment and incomes. “Yes, there was recovery, but we already have signs that incomes are not keeping pace with inflation,” Kochhar says, adding that there’s too much uncertainty to predict how Americans’ finances shifted in the second year of the pandemic.The public debate regularly depicts the middle class as the victim of employment polarization and income stagnation. While the Great Recession had a significant impact on Americans’ finances, this latest pandemic-spurred recession was so short and government support so robust, Kochhar believes it's unlikely to lead to a significant shift in incomes.īut it’s harder to tell how the recovery in 2021 will affect Americans’ standing in the various income brackets. “That likely put sort of a floor to how much incomes fell during this time period for lower- and middle-income families,” Kochhar said. But a whopping 28% of lower-income Americans experienced joblessness at some point during the first year of the pandemic.īut the effects likely would have been much worse if the federal government had not provided enhanced unemployment benefits, which nearly one in five middle-class families received, according to Pew. About 14% of middle-class Americans lost their job in 2020, while about 8% of upper-income families experienced a similar income disruption. Thanks to this shift, the income gap between upper-class Americans and everyone else widened slightly, stemming largely from pandemic unemployment.Ībout 15% of Americans suffered some form of unemployment in 2020, with the biggest impact falling on lower-income households. ![]() Last year, it was just 50%, a level that has stayed fairly consistent since the Great Recession, according to Pew. About 61% of American adults were part of a middle-class family in 1971. ![]() Pew also has a calculator that’s updated periodically that lets readers enter where they live, how much they earn, and how many are in their household to get a more personalized definition of where they fall on the income spectrum.Įven though incomes have continued to rise, those who can consider themselves middle-class (at least in a financial sense) have shrunk in the past five decades, according to Pew. The research released Wednesday is based on Pew’s analysis of the 2021 Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement, produced by the U.S. Pew tends to update its definition of middle-class on an annual basis. Why the different ranges for different sizes of families? Smaller households typically require less income to support the same lifestyle as larger households, especially if that family includes children who don’t yet earn an income.
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