Andy Sumner, a scholar with Britain’s Institute for Development Studies who is working this year at the Washington-based Center for Global Development, looked at the political ramifications of Dr. Palma’s breakdown and asked a provocative question: “Are the middle classes the new revolutionaries?”Of course, the problem in applying that theory to countries like Canada is that the middle class actually hasn't been able to hold onto its position, whether framed in terms of wages or total income. And the obvious culprit looks to me to be the ability of upper-income interests to play the two lower categories against each other.
“The middle classes generally get half of the economic pie wherever you look, and are incredibly successful about protecting their half,” Dr. Sumner notes. As a result, he says, “politics is increasingly a fight for the remaining half between the richest 10 per cent and the poorest 40 per cent … between the very rich and the very poor over who can win over the middle classes.”
Most of the time, we're told that we have no choice but to send money up the income chain in hopes that it'll result in wage gains focused mostly on the middle class. And far too often, middle-class voters buy into the theory.
But once we reach the point where wages are actually set to rise significantly, it's easy enough for the upper class to then talk up the needs of people on lower and fixed incomes as reason to rein in the growth. (That is, to the point where any spoils are focused solely on the absolute top level of society - which is far enough removed from mere ordinary people to argue that its gains won't influence prices on basic goods.)
So the effort to encourage greater equality isn't as simple as trying to win a single tug-of-war between the poor and the wealthy. Instead, it involves having to keep both the lower and middle classes both engaged enough to see politics as worth pursuing, and skeptical enough to call out the naked greed of the privileged few for what it is.
Interesting implicit definition of "middle class" there, which actually speaks to Erika Shaker's article about lack of precision defining the middle class that you linked Saturday morning. So is the middle class really definable as "The income spectrum from percentiles 41-90", as in everyone up to but not including the top 10%? That sounds a bit odd to me, and certainly has political implications in terms of what "the middle class" should be construed as wanting.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I'd tend to define middle class more in terms of their social situation. If seriously pressed I'd treat it kind of like one of those ill-defined "syndromes" the psychiatric professions use to describe mental disorders. A member of the middle class has above some number of ticks on the checklist: Stable access to housing, employment and education, is not stigmatized by society for working class markers such as dialect, mannerisms and taste, but isn't rich--doesn't have a huge house, second home, servants, kids going to expensive private schools, foreign vacations above a certain frequency and expense, significant investment income . . .
As a society provides less stable employment with income sufficient to afford such things, and reduces government services such as education, such a definition of "middle class" would actually catch fewer people as the middle class shrank, where a definition of middle class based on a fixed percentage of the population would claim that 50% of Indonesians were middle class.
Basically, though, it's a problem in that "class" is a category that really makes sense in terms of social roles (e.g. "working" is defined by wage labour, "bourgeois" by gaining income from ownership), and "middle" isn't a role.
A fair point to be sure. The "total income" link within the post notes a strictly statistical definition from StatsCan (families between 75% and 150% of the median after-tax income), which I'd think is likely a fair definition from an income inequality standpoint (and actually does capture the shrinking middle class effect). Meanwhile, your checklist would provide a much more precise definition for the purpose of classifying and reaching a target class.
ReplyDeleteBut I'm not sure the precise definition affects the broader point of the post: at a certain point, corporate interests are able to shift from seeking the support of higher-earning workers with the promise of wage increases, to seeking the support of lower-earning workers based on the fear that wage increases will leave them behind.
(And for the sake of completeness, let's add "non-workers" to "lower-earning workers" to the last sentence.)
ReplyDeleteI became a Dipper on the weekend, because I have lost faith in the Liberals and I know the Conservatives are really Republicans. I just hope the NDP comes through with sensible policies.
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