The Growing Size and Incomes of the Upper Middle Class

INCOME AND BENEFITS POLICY CENTER

RESEARCH REPORT

The Growing Size and Incomes of the Upper Middle Class

Stephen J. Rose June 2016

ABOUT THE URBAN INSTITUTE The nonprofit Urban Institute is dedicated to elevating the debate on social and economic policy. For nearly five decades, Urban scholars have conducted research and offered evidence-based solutions that improve lives and strengthen communities across a rapidly urbanizing world. Their objective research helps expand opportunities for all, reduce hardship among the most vulnerable, and strengthen the effectiveness of the public sector.

Copyright ? June 2016. Urban Institute. Permission is granted for reproduction of this file, with attribution to the Urban Institute. Cover image by Tim Meko.

Contents

Acknowledgments

iv

The Growing Size and Incomes of the Upper Middle Class

1

Methodology

2

The Changing Size and Incomes of the Upper Middle Class

6

Changing Income Shares

10

Sensitivity Tests: Other Methods of Determining the Changing Size of the Upper Middle Class 12

Conclusion

13

Appendix A. Income Share Changes Using a Relative Approach to Defining Social Classes 15

Notes

19

References

21

About the Authors

22

Statement of Independence

23

Acknowledgments

This report was written independently by the author with logistical and editorial support from the Urban Institute.

The views expressed are those of the author and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. Funders do not determine research findings or the insights and recommendations of Urban experts. Further information on the Urban Institute's funding principles is available at support.

The author thanks Greg Acs and other members of Urban who commented on earlier versions of this paper.

IV

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Growing Size and Incomes of the Upper Middle Class

Many people talk about the conditions of the middle class but few define it, and the term upper middle class is equally ambiguous. Because people tend to live in communities with people with similar incomes, they view themselves as being near the middle because their neighbors' circumstances are similar to their own even if their incomes are significantly below or above the US median.

In response to six Pew Research Center polls over the past six years that ask, "Of these commonly used names for the social classes, which would you say you belong in? The upper class, upper middle class, middle class, lower middle class, or lower class?," about 9 out of 10 respondents identified as being in one of the three parts of the middle class. Of the remaining respondents, 1 to 2 percent said upper class, and 8 to 11 percent said lower class.

The concept of social class knits together multiple factors such as income, wealth, education, prestige, and cultural sophistication, so there is no agreed-upon definition of middle class. One way to characterize the middle class is by identifying those who clearly are not in it. The rich aren't middle class because they have resources that permit them to have the best of many things. The poor and near-poor have very limited options and often rely on means-tested government programs to meet their living expenses. Because defining by exclusion leaves a very broad middle class, many people segment it into upper, middle, and lower portions. But even these divisions leave diverse categories. Lower middle class people generally have modest living standards, while those in the upper middle class have living standards considerably above the basic necessities and discretionary income available to spend on higher-quality goods and services (e.g., bigger homes, better appliances, eating out, and foreign travel).

Studying the middle class requires an operational definition of the group. This paper uses current money income to define class because current income is closely related to all the factors associated with social class and because data on current income are readily available. Although there are no generally accepted income ranges for defining classes, there are many reasonable alternatives, and this paper considers several of them.

The paper focuses on how the upper middle and middle classes have changed between 1979 and 2014. I set class boundaries by using absolute income thresholds adjusted for inflation. This approach is analogous to how the federal poverty level is set. The federal poverty level is based on an absolute standard of need set in the 1960s that is adjusted for inflation each year. The advantage of this absolute

approach is that the size of the classes can change over time. In contrast, groups of interest that are defined by relative approaches that are based on fixed percentile ranges always stay the same size. Appendix A presents results from a variety of relative approaches to defining class divisions.

I found that the upper middle class has grown substantially, from 12.9 percent of the population in 1979 to 29.4 percent in 2014. Further, with the exception of the bottom 6 percent, real growth occurred throughout the income ladder. However, that growth was unevenly distributed in that people with higher incomes had faster growth than those with lower incomes. Consequently, these findings expand the discussion of rising inequality to focus on more than just the top 1 percent. Indeed, a massive shift has occurred in the center of gravity of the economy. In 1979, the middle class controlled a bit more than 46 percent of all incomes, and the upper middle class and rich controlled 30 percent. In contrast, in 2014 the rich and upper middle class controlled 63 percent of all incomes (52 percent for the upper middle class and 11 percent for the rich); the middle class share had shrunk to 26 percent; and the shares of the lower middle class, poor, and near-poor had declined by half.

Methodology

Tracking the evolution of the upper middle class required several significant methodological decisions, including selecting beginning and end points for the study, choosing a dataset, defining the unit of the analysis (e.g., individual, family, household), adjusting for differences in the number of individuals in each unit, and taking inflation into account.

This study used 1979 as a starting point because it was the last business cycle peak before income inequality grew dramatically in the first half of the 1980s.1 The year 2014 was chosen as the study's end point because it was the most recent year for which income data were available. The study also examined whether the size of the upper middle class changed dramatically after the slow growth from 2000 to 2007, followed by the deep recession of 2007?09 and the slow recovery from that recession.

The data for this study came from the Annual Socioeconomic Supplement to the March Current Population Survey (CPS). This survey collects information monthly from 50,000 to 75,000 households and is used to determine the monthly unemployment rate. The March supplement contains detailed questions on personal and family incomes from different sources (e.g., earnings, interest payments, dividends, pensions, unemployment insurance, and social security).

2

THE GROWING SIZE AND INCOMES OF THE UPPER MIDDLE CLASS

To define the unit of analysis, the study followed the practice of Social Stratification in the United States (Rose 2015) and focused on "non-dependent or primary adults"--people who are family heads, spouses, or single people. Children under age 18 are excluded. Roommates or boarders are treated as separate single people, and cohabiters are treated as married with their incomes and number of children combined. Adults excluded from this approach include adult children (over age 18) living with parents, other adult relatives of the family head (e.g., elderly parents, siblings), and the 8 million people who live in group quarters (e.g., prisons, military bases, and long-term health care facilities).

The main income tables in US Census Bureau reports focus on households and combine all the incomes of everyone in a single housing unit. Other census tabulations are limited to families--two or more related people in the same household--and don't treat cohabiters as being married. Finally, some census tables report personal (individual) income for every person, including husbands and wives. This type of report, of course, creates problems in determining how to divide the income from married couples' joint assets. The present study looked at family incomes and treated single people as separate one-person "families."

When defining social class categories based on income levels,2 it is important to adjust for the number of people in the family. A large literature discusses this issue, and the poverty thresholds are based on the number of people in the family. To achieve a common metric of standard of living, all incomes were converted into family-of-three equivalents.3 As table 1 shows, a single person with an income of $58,000 and a married couple with three children and an income of $128,000 each has a family-of-three income equivalent of $100,000. Children over and under 18 years old were included in determining adjusted family income, but they were not included as nondependent adults in terms of determining population estimates.

TABLE 1 Income Level Necessary to Equal $100,000 Family-of-Three Equivalent Income

Family size

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Actual income

$57,735 $81,650 $100,000 $115,470 $129,099 $141,421 $152,753

THE GROWING SIZE AND INCOMES OF THE UPPER MIDDLE CLASS

3

The family-of-three equivalent approach has the benefit of yielding a median value close to the median of unadjusted incomes of all households and offers the closest number to the average household size of 2.6 persons.

With this basic framework of analysis, the question became how to define five social classes in 2014 (table 2). Let's begin by defining the bottom and the top. I defined the lower class as those people living in families with incomes up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level ($30,000 family-of-three equivalents) for the poor and near-poor. To set the boundary for the rich, I turned for guidance to recent Pew polls, which report that 1 to 2 percent of the population consider themselves upper class. In 2014, 1.8 percent of the population had incomes above $350,000, so I used that as the lower boundary for the rich.

Next, the vast middle needed to be split into the lower middle, middle, and upper middle classes. I set the bottom threshold for the upper middle class at five times the poverty level, or $100,000 for a family of three. This approach is similar to but a bit more exclusive than the one used in the 1970s by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which defined a "high budget level" at 4.25 times the poverty level. To check the importance of this specific definition of the lower bound of the upper middle class, I used a variety of thresholds (10 to 20 percent above and 15 percent below $100,000) and showed that the resulting trends in the change in the size of the upper middle class are almost identical.

Setting the lower bound of the upper middle class income at $100,000 left incomes between $30,000 and $100,000 to be divided between the middle class and lower middle class. I defined the lower middle class as having size-adjusted incomes between $30,000 and $50,000 and for the middle class to range from $50,000 to $100,000. The precise demarcation between the lower middle and middle classes is not crucial for this paper because the main focus is on the upper middle class. The sensitivity analyses that changed the lowest income of the upper middle class, however, would affect the size of the middle class.

TABLE 2 Defining Five Social Classes by 2014 Incomes

Class description

Poor and near-poor Lower middle class Middle class Upper middle class Rich

Family-of-Three Equivalents

Lower bound

$0 $30,000 $50,000 $100,000 $350,000

Upper bound

$29,999 $49,999 $99,999 $349,999 None

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THE GROWING SIZE AND INCOMES OF THE UPPER MIDDLE CLASS

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